D. H. Lawrence and Psychoanalysis 9780367416157, 9780367473440

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D. H. Lawrence and Psychoanalysis

This book opens out a wholly new field of enquiry within a familiar subject: it offers a detailed – yet eminently readable – historical investigation, of a kind never yet undertaken, of the impact of psychoanalysis (at a crucial moment of its history) on the thinking and writing of D.H. Lawrence. It considers the impact on his writing, through his relationship with Frieda Weekley, of the maverick Austrian analyst Otto Gross; it situates the great works of 1911–21 in relation to the controversial issues at stake in the Freud-Jung quarrel, about which his good friend, the English psychoanalyst David Eder, kept him informed; and it explores his sympathy with the maverick American analyst Trigant Burrow. It is a study to interest a literary audience by its close reading of Lawrence’s texts, and a psychoanalytic audience by its detailed consideration of the contribution made to contemporary debate by three comparatively neglected analytic thinkers. John Turner was formerly Senior Lecturer in English at Swansea University. He has written a book on Wordsworth, a guide to Macbeth and co-authored two further books on Shakespeare. He has written widely on D.H. Lawrence and contributed essays on Winnicott to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. He is currently preparing, with Gottfried Heuer, a translation of selected works by Otto Gross.

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature



D. H. Lawrence and Psychoanalysis

John Turner

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of John Turner to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-41615-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-47344-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

for Carl and for Mary

Contents

Preface List of Abbreviations

ix xiii

1

The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross

1

2

Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism 31

3

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound 65

4

Women in Love: Death of the Father

5

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious 151

6

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria 195

110

Index

251

Preface

The aim of this book is to provide the first full-length study of the works of D.H. Lawrence in the context of contemporary debates within the psychoanalytic movement. It focusses on the years 1912–21 when those debates were at their most intense and most immediately within the range of his attention, and it reads the four major novels of that period – Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love and Aaron’s Rod – to assess the extent of their impact upon him. There have been a number of essays on the theoretical similarities and differences between Lawrence and Freud, and a smaller number on the question of his alignment with Jung; but such discussion has always taken place at an ideological level, unperturbed by the historical reality of the day-to-day issues that were exciting and perplexing the protagonists themselves. During these years Lawrence was as well placed as any English writer of his generation to know what was going on in the psychoanalytic world, and was even anxious to make his own contribution to it. For all his cavalier impatience with other people’s opinions, he was quick to run with new ideas, to see what he could make of them – especially when those ideas struck home to the heart of his emotional life, as they did in the questions of erotic emancipation, incestuous feeling, creative living and the traumas caused by its repression. These were all live issues in psychoanalytic circles of the time, and it is the detailed history of Lawrence’s interactions with those circles in these ongoing areas of concern that I wish to open up in my book and make available for future critical discussion. Lawrence had three main points of contact with the psychoanalytic movement. First, there was the maverick Austrian analyst Otto Gross, whose views about sexual and political freedom made such a lasting impression on Frieda Weekley and her sister Else Jaffe. The importance of Gross’s ideas for Lawrence, as transmitted by Frieda and her German family, has been greatly undervalued; they had an emotional impact that went as deep as his marriage, lasting throughout the period covered by this book, and they provoked fresh thinking about sexual morality, the meaning of relationship and the nature of patriarchy. Second, there was his London circle of friends: David Eder, his wife Edith, his sister-in-law Barbara Low and, more peripherally, Ernest Jones. At the very moment of his introduction to Lawrence, Eder was in the process of supplanting

x Preface his long-standing loyalty to Freud with a new enthusiasm for Jung, whose faith in the constructive powers of the unconscious sustained an interest in religious and mythological symbolism to which Eder was deeply sympathetic. His friendship with Lawrence was at its closest in summer 1914 and autumn 1917, and on each occasion left a clear and profound mark on Lawrence’s thinking and writing. Third, there was the maverick American psychoanalyst and group-analyst Trigant Burrow, whose work Lawrence met in 1919 and with whom he would later correspond, and whose book The Social Basis of Consciousness he would review. As Jones noted sourly, Burrow’s thinking was closer to Jung than to Freud in these years, and it was closer still to that of Otto Gross. There is a direct line of thought descending from Gross through Jung to Burrow. All three men were preoccupied by problems concerning the nature of authentic creative living for which orthodox Freudianism had no language, and it is the contention of this book that it was not until a generation later, with the work of the British object relations school of psychoanalysis, that an analytic language emerged that could do full justice to those problems. It is surprising that no-one has yet set out to tell the history of Lawrence’s engagement with psychoanalytic ideas; perhaps, there are two main reasons for this. The first has been the difficulty of access to much of the material. In the case of Otto Gross, the relevant material has been scattered and, until recently, untranslated. Over the last 50 years, however, the details of Gross’s life, work and ideas have become more generally available, piecemeal at first through the pioneering work of Martin Green, then more thoroughly through the work of Emanuel Hurwitz and, most recently, of Gottfried Heuer and a small associated band of scholars. Gross’s letters to Frieda were published by myself in 1990, with the help of Conni Rumpf-Worthen and Ruth Jenkins, his unpublished letters to Else followed in 1998, translated by Gottfried Heuer and Sam Whimster, and in 2012 Lois Madison published a literal translation of Gross’s psychological works, unfortunately excluding many of the overtly political essays. In the case of Eder, despite recent facsimile reprints of The Endowment of Motherhood and War Shock, his writings, though extensive, were ephemeral and dispersed amongst a wide variety of medical journals and literary periodicals. They are hard to access; similarly, his contributions to medical congresses, though frequent and often of interest, are no longer easy to find. These difficulties are compounded by the fact that there is as yet no scholarly history of the course of psychoanalysis in Britain during the years preceding the foundation of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1919. The work of Trigant Burrow, on the other hand, is reasonably accessible, and has become more so as a result of the recent 2013 selection made by Edi Gatti Pertegato and Giorgio Orghe Pertegato, which includes many of the essays relevant to the study of Lawrence.

Preface  xi The second reason consists in the problematical nature of the evidence itself. Lawrence was not a scholar, and the pedigree of ideas held no interest for him, nor did he like to acknowledge intellectual debts. There is, of course, hard evidence about what Lawrence knew of psychoanalysis. There are the three texts that he wrote with psychoanalysis explicitly in mind – the 1918–19 Studies in Classic American Literature, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious; we know he read Hinkle’s translation of Jung’s Transformations and Symbols of the Libido in the autumn of 1918; we can determine which essays of Burrow he read; we can identify the emergence of new psychoanalytic terminology in his writing – words like sadish, extrovert, archetype; and there are a few documentary reminiscences of specific conversations, most of them tantalisingly incomplete, like those of Middleton Murry. Otherwise, much of the evidence for the impact that psychoanalysis made on Lawrence is circumstantial, and must be inferred from the texts; the proper way to adduce this evidence is by the traditional manner of literary criticism, asking the familiar question ‘this is so – isn’t it?’ But the web of a person’s thinking is made of many strands, and they are not always distinguishable in the final weave. As always with books about influence, there is the danger brought by the personal equation, the risk of finding only what is sought; it is easy to imagine the needle whilst missing the haystack. It seems to me clear, however, that much of the novelty and vibrancy of the fiction originates in the response, both welcoming and hostile, to the excitement of the new psychoanalytic ideas that he met through Frieda and her family, through Eder and his friends and, to a lesser extent, through Trigant Burrow. I offer this book in pursuit of that conviction, believing it will open up a neglected field of inquiry that will prove of interest and of use to future readers and scholars of Lawrence. I should like in conclusion to express my thanks in particular to the following people who have in their different ways furthered and sustained my interest in this project over its long gestation: John Worthen, who shared his great knowledge of Lawrence with accustomed generosity and read an earlier version of the text with habitual scrupulousness; Gottfried Heuer, who was similarly generous with his knowledge of Gross and who is now preparing a translation of Gross’s political writings with me; Peter Shoenberg, who long ago pointed me in the direction of Winnicott and generously offered hospitality during many expeditions to London libraries; David Ellis, who spared the time to read this book in an earlier form and commented helpfully on it; Sue Gagg, who also attended to it at an earlier stage and contributed valuably towards it; Carl Krockel, who talked about Goethe and Lawrence at the right time; and lastly to Mary Davies Turner, who has lived through the whole of this thing and survived with her affections intact. To all

xii Preface these people I owe much of what is good in this book; they may justly disclaim what is not. All quotations from the works of D.H. Lawrence and Frieda Lawrence are reproduced by permission of Paper Lion Ltd., the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli and Cambridge University Press, to whom I gratefully extend my thanks.

Abbreviations

Where possible, all quotations from Lawrence’s letters and works have been taken from the Cambridge edition, using the abbreviations listed below.

Letters 1L 2L 3L 4L 5L 6L

The Letters of D.H. Lawrence: Volume 1, September 1901– May 1913, ed. by James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). The Letters of D.H. Lawrence: Volume 2, June 1913– October 1916, ed. by George J. Zyaturk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). The Letters of D.H. Lawrence: Volume 3, October 1916June 1921, ed. by James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). The Letters of D.H. Lawrence: Volume 4, June 1921–March 1924, ed. by Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The Letters of D.H. Lawrence: Volume 5, March 1924– March 1927, ed. by James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The Letters of D.H. Lawrence: Volume 6, March 1927– November 1928, ed. by James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Works AR EmyE FWL IR

Aaron’s Rod, ed. by Mara Kalnins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). England, My England and Other Stories, ed. by Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) The First ‘Women in Love’, ed. by John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Introductions and Reviews, ed. by N.H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

xiv Abbreviations K LAH LG MEH MN Plays PM PO Poems PFU R RDP SCAL SL SM SS STH T TI VicG WL

Kangaroo, ed. by Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories, ed. by John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The Lost Girl, ed. by John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Movements in European History, ed. by Philip Crumpton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Mr Noon, ed. by Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). The Plays, ed. by Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Paul Morel, ed. by Helen Baron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, ed. by John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). The Poems, 2 vols, ed. by Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. by Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The Rainbow, ed. by Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. by Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. by Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Sons and Lovers, ed. by Helen Baron and Carl Baron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. by Brian Finney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Sea and Sardinia, ed. by Mara Kalnins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. by Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). The Trespasser, ed. by Elizabeth Mansfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. by Paul Eggert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). The Vicar’s Garden and Other Stories, ed. by N.H. Reeve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Women in Love, ed. by David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

1

The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross

I “Not I, But the Wind…”: The Meeting of Lawrence and Frieda Weekley One Sunday early in 1912 D. H. Lawrence went to lunch with Ernest Weekley, the Professor of Modern Languages at Nottingham University, hoping for help in finding a job as Lektor in a German university; and there he met and fell in love with the professor’s wife, Frieda Weekley, the second daughter of the minor German aristocrat, Friedrich Baron von Richthofen. It was perhaps the most significant meeting in the lives of either; and it was almost certainly the moment when Lawrence first became acquainted with psychoanalysis, a topic that would absorb him for the next ten years, shaping both his fiction and his non-fiction and culminating in the publication of the two increasingly critical studies, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922). The actual date of Lawrence’s meeting with Frieda is uncertain. She thought it in April; but this is almost certainly wrong and, in the Cambridge biography of Lawrence, John Worthen set out the available evidence, weighed it and convincingly settled upon 3 March 1912 as the likeliest date.1 Before lunch Lawrence and Frieda talked for half an hour together in the sitting-room and, over 20 years later, in her autobiography “Not I, But the Wind…”, Frieda left an account of their discussion. Although written so much after the event and unconfirmed by any other source, 2 it carries conviction. Lovers tend to remember their first meetings. Even if not an accurate factual record of what actually passed between them, it is reliable as a guide to the kind of story that Lawrence and Frieda liked to tell themselves about the meaning and origins of their relationship. In anthropological language, it is Frieda’s version of the myth of origin of their relationship, such as lovers like to tell, containing a charter of the values that they live by; and the fact that Frieda’s account begins in the present tense makes clear that, as in myth, the narrative has implications that transcend the ‘historical’ moment it ostensibly describes. I see him before me as he entered the house. A long thin figure, quick straight legs, light, sure movements. He seemed so obviously simple.

2  The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross Yet he arrested my attention. There was something more than met the eye. What kind of a bird was this? The half-hour before lunch the two of us talked in my room, French windows open, curtains fluttering in the spring wind, my children playing on the lawn. He said he had finished with his attempts at knowing women. I was amazed at the way he fiercely denounced them. I had never before heard anything like it. I laughed, yet I could tell he had tried very hard, and had cared. We talked about Oedipus and understanding leaped through our words.3 The open French windows and the curtains fluttering in the spring wind create a liminal moment as moving as any in Lawrence’s fiction; already here the breeze is playing across the boundaries of her life, admitting childhood echoes of freedom into the staidness of her sitting-room, bringing new life. In Lawrence’s own words, from the poem where Frieda found the title for her autobiography, ‘A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time’ (Poems 204); and here, in this sense of a new personal life which is simultaneously the inauguration of a new historical period, we find the heart of their shared mythology, their celebration of the infectious spontaneity and creativity that they each valued in their emotional and sexual lives, and whose absence from psychoanalytic discourse would eventually lie at the heart of Lawrence’s critique. ‘We talked of Oedipus and understanding leaped through our words’: Frieda had been wrong about the date, and may just possibly have been wrong about the topic. Perhaps she was running together the many conversations about Oedipus that she did have with Lawrence during the next few months. Yet it is easy to imagine how the conversation she describes might have unfolded. Why do you want to go abroad? You’re a writer? What are you writing? This last question, addressed to the fierce young man who in early March was engaged on that draft of Sons and Lovers now known as ‘Paul Morel’ III, might well have provoked a conversation about Oedipus. But if so, each partner to the conversation would have approached the subject differently; for whilst Lawrence had almost certainly never heard of psychoanalysis, Frieda would have been able to talk familiarly and enthusiastically about it. The conversation must have attracted and astonished him in equal measure. As John Worthen says, they may have been discussing psychoanalysis or they may have been discussing Sophocles; few Nottingham wives would have been able to do both, and fewer still would have been prepared to do so in the sitting-room before Sunday lunch.4 His comment is too cautious; in 1912 there would have been very few women in England able to do so. In taking on Frieda, Lawrence immediately found that he would have to take on Freud as well.

The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross  3 “Not I, But the Wind…” is discreet about the primary source of Frieda’s enthusiasm for psychoanalysis, but its personal origins are clear. ‘I  had just met a remarkable disciple of Freud’, she writes, who had awakened her out of the somnambulism of conventional life into ‘the consciousness of my own proper self’. But he had left her ‘full of undigested theories’: Fanatically I believed that if only sex were “free” the world would straightaway turn into a paradise. I suffered and struggled at outs with society, and felt absolutely isolated. The process left me unbalanced. I felt alone. What could I do, when there were so many millions who thought differently from me? But I couldn’t give in, I couldn’t submit. It wasn’t that I felt hostile, only different. I could not accept society. And then Lawrence came.5 That ‘remarkable disciple of Freud’ was the maverick psychoanalyst and apostle of free love, Otto Gross, with whom Frieda had had an affair in 1907; and this was the line of descent – Freud, Gross, Frieda – that initially informed Lawrence’s views of psychoanalysis and would always continue to influence it. Since the publication of Martin Green’s pioneering book The von Richthofen Sisters: The Triumphant and the Tragic Modes of Love in 1974, the importance of Gross to Frieda’s life and to her subsequent relationship with Lawrence has been widely recognised. The fact that, in her autobiography, she says she had only ‘just met’ Gross when she got to know Lawrence – the two events were actually five years apart – suggests the close connexion between the two men in her mind. In Green’s words, Gross’s world-view was the ‘ideological dowry’ that Frieda brought to Lawrence;6 and it was a dowry, moreover, that had been enriched by a further brief affair in 1911 with the anarchist painter Ernst Frick, who was one of Gross’s closest friends and followers and who must have ensured that Gross’s legacy was still fresh in her mind when she met Lawrence in the spring of 1912.7 The story of her love for Lawrence which she tells in “Not I, But the Wind…”, however – that they fell in love and eloped to Germany after six weeks of knowing one another – is a tale for public consumption only. The real situation was more complicated than that. It is one of the achievements of John Worthen’s biography D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912 that the story of those first weeks has been clarified. We can now see the struggle that Lawrence had to ‘win’ Frieda, if that is the right word, and to prevent her from going back to her husband after the brief summer affair she intended. Since writing his biography, however, Worthen has gone further still. In the light of letters newly come to light, he has convincingly argued that Frieda went to Germany with Lawrence in 1912 not primarily to have an affair with him but to set herself up as a free woman ‘as her sisters were free, and Frieda Gross was free, and the people she knew in Ascona were free’.8 Her affair with

4  The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross Frick was the catalyst, and one very real possibility in her mind in the spring of 1912 was finally to launch herself upon the kind of life that Otto Gross had offered her five years before. To Frieda in this mood Lawrence must have seemed, as John Worthen puts it, ‘an old unreconstructed male, demanding partnership and commitment and monogamy’.9 It was not only the influence of her husband and children pulling her back to the security of family-life in Nottingham that he had to resist; it was also the counter-influence of Gross as it worked through her German friends and family, drawing her forward into an adventurous new life of erotic freedom. Frieda’s enthusiasm for psychoanalysis, in other words, was not primarily intellectual but acutely personal; it was bound up with strong feelings for a past lover, admiration for present friends and hopes for an immediate future. The priority given in her text to Gross bears witness to the priority that his ideas still occupied in her life in 1912; and this had implications for Lawrence too. The triangular template that was shaping the autobiographical fiction of ‘Paul Morel’ was about to shape real life. Not only was he in love with a married woman; he was in love with a married woman still enamoured of the ideas and life-style preached by her former lover. Frieda took Gross’s letters to Germany with her in May 1912 and, whilst this might have been partly to safeguard them from her husband, it was also because they were important to her in themselves as corroboration of the kind of woman that she aspired to be. Later she even sent some of Gross’s letters to her husband to justify her decision to stay with Lawrence. In taking on Frieda, Lawrence did not only have to take on Freud but also Otto Gross. He was Gross’s successor whom, in 1912, Frieda described to her German friends as ‘rather like Otto’.10 Lawrence was well aware of his situation and, in 1916 in Twilight in Italy, he even made a coded reference to himself as the son of Otto Gross – the oedipal son, that is, who had to slay the father in order to win the mother. Although he would meet the intellectual challenge of psychoanalysis later, its full meaning for him can only be understood as an inseparable part of the story of his marriage. Otto Gross was a ghostly presence in his bed whom he would try many times to exorcise. That initial conversation about Oedipus recurred in many different forms, as Lawrence grappled with the implications of everything that Frieda had learned from Gross and her German friends; and it is with Gross that we must begin.

II Otto Gross: Early Life (1877–1907) Otto Gross was born in the Steiermark in Austria on 17 March 1877. He was thus two years older than Frieda, eight years older than Lawrence. The most obviously powerful figure in the young Otto’s life was his extrovert and energetic father, Hans Gross, who was a living epitome of

The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross  5 the patriarchy of fin-de-siècle Europe. A paterfamilias at home and an internationally famous criminologist by profession, he made a successful academic career out of exploiting new scientific methods to catch criminals and to weed out those whom he thought degenerate – ‘the tramp, the revolutionary, the habitual thief, the pederast’, as Martin Green lists them.11 He founded and edited a criminological journal (Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik); he wrote a successful Handbook for Examining Magistrates; he founded the Criminological Institute at Graz and, according to Green, by a life-time of hard work he became the prime agent in establishing criminology as an academic discipline in German-speaking countries.12 He used the seemingly valuefree methods of natural science not only to catch criminals but also to construct criminal typologies, to understand criminal psychology and to underwrite the power of the state. It was a distinguished career, and one that he hoped would be an example to his only child Otto. At first all went according to plan. Otto was a precocious and privileged child, though ominously impractical in his dealings with the real world where his father was so obviously successful. He was educated privately at home and at private schools, and began his medical career as an unpaid assistant in 1897. He completed his medical studies in 1899, and practised as a ship’s doctor on the Hamburg line to South America before finally opting for psychiatry. In 1902, after three years’ medical work, he became a clinical assistant at the psychiatric-neurological clinic in Graz. It was around this time that he seems first to have met Freud, and his Graz lectures ‘On Freud’s Therapeutic Methods’ marked Freud’s first entry into academic discussion anywhere.13 Also in 1902 he first entered the Burghölzli, the Zurich mental hospital where Jung worked, for the first of a long series of unsuccessful attempts to conquer a long-standing addiction to morphine; and the choice of the Burghölzli suggests Hans Gross’s readiness to buy the best for his son. In 1903 Otto married Frieda Schloffer, also of Graz, and over the next few years built up a successful career in academic psychiatry, writing for professional journals and, from 1902, increasingly interesting himself in psychoanalysis.14 His first two books date from this period, and several psychiatric articles, including two in his father’s Archiv. At this stage of his life, his views were close to those of his father, believing, for instance, that ethical systems had evolved as survival mechanisms for the majority and that the minority who could not adapt must regrettably go to the wall. However, beneath this Social Darwinism, a counter-spirit was at work; the repressed hostility to his father and his father’s values that underlay his impracticality in money matters gradually began to work free, and Gross rediscovered himself as the ‘living antithesis’ of his father.15 In 1905 he and his wife visited Ascona, the Swiss countercultural centre on the north shore of Lake Maggiore, where a variety of anarchists, socialists, artists, naturists, vegetarians, misfits and purveyors of

6  The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross all sorts of alternative beliefs were seeking more congenial ways of life.16 Bourgeois patriarchy had created its own Bohemian antithesis, and Gross quickly formed friendships in anarchist circles that transformed his life and work, most notably with Erich Mühsam and Johannes Nohl. In 1905 he was appointed research assistant under Kraepelin at the Royal Psychiatric Clinic in Munich where, in September 1906, in the congenial Bohemian quarter of Schwabing, he began to break free from his past. Later that year or early in 1907, his wife Frieda, an old schoolfriend of the two sisters Else and Frieda von Richthofen, introduced Otto to Else and her husband Edgar Jaffe, Professor of Economics at Heidelberg University. By now Otto had come to believe in the ethical value of free love as a means to lift the sexual repressions on which the bourgeois patriarchal family depended. Harnessing Freudian techniques to Nietzschean values, and subsuming both under an anarchist critique of the structures of present-day political authority, he had espoused a sexual libertarianism that he hoped would transcend the work of both men, freeing Eros and Psyche from the chains of marriage to meet in the mutuality of a socially transformative desire. In January 1907 Otto and Frieda Gross had a child, but by the end of the spring Otto was insisting on a pact to practise free love and had begun an affair with Else, followed soon by a simultaneous affair with her sister Frieda Weekley, in Germany on her annual visit from Nottingham. Sam Whimster describes the spring of 1907 as the high spot of Gross’s erotic career, ‘his Zarathustra moment’, and certainly Frieda Weekley thought so. ‘You won’t find 3 people like the 3 of us on every street-corner’, she told him.17 It was in this same year too that the Jaffes introduced the Grosses to Max and Marianne Weber, and that Max used the word ‘charismatic’ for the first time in his written work to describe the powerful charm exerted by Gross on his followers.18 Gross’s Zarathustra moment, however, was short-lived. By 20 May, having been accompanied by Gross on the cross-channel ferry, Frieda Weekley was back with her husband and children in Nottingham. Although for a further year she longed for Gross’s letters, and could not summon up the prudence to destroy them when they arrived, she rejected all his calls to leave her husband and come to Munich. Else meanwhile – pregnant by Gross and motivated, he thought, by jealousy of her sister – had transferred her affections to a man whose democratic principles offended Gross’s Nietzschean belief in the ‘separation of the aristocracy from the people’;19 and by the end of the year Frieda Gross had left him too, prior to moving in with his close friend Ernst Frick, by whom she would have three children. Gross’s professional career declined along with his personal life. He had published his third book in the summer of 1907, Das Freud’sche Ideogenitätsmoment, und seine Bedeutung im manisch-depressiven Irresein Kraepelin’s; and his career reached its peak in September at the

The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross  7 First International Congress of Psychiatry and Neurology in Amsterdam, where he delivered a paper on his own theory of the cerebral secondary function, and also defended psychoanalysis vigorously from the floor. Later that same month, however, Weber rejected an exposition of his views that Gross submitted to his Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, and the following April Freud rejected similar views at what was in effect the First International Congress of Psychoanalysis at Salzburg. Free love and the overthrow of bourgeois patriarchy had no place in Freud’s hopes for psychoanalysis. ‘We are doctors, and intend to remain doctors’, Freud told him (Wir sind Ärzte und wollen Ärzte bleiben).20 What Gross thought of as his ‘new ethic’ was beginning to distance him from the middle ground of middle-class academic and professional life.

III The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross Gross’s writings fall into four main periods: the early psychiatric works with their Social Darwinist ethic (1901–04), the two books that set out to integrate psychoanalysis and psychiatry (1907–09), the pre-war political writings in which psychoanalysis was put to work on behalf of revolutionary anarchism (1913) and the post-war writings in which it served the cause of Marxist revolution (1919–20). There are also two late significant psychoanalytic works, the essay Über Destruktionssymbolik (1914) and the posthumous book Drei Aufsätze über den inneren Konflikt (1920). Gross’s ‘new ethic’ emerged in the years 1906–13, and was the subject of a book-length manuscript, since lost, from which an extract was published in Die Aktion in 1913.21 It is mainly the period from 1907 to 1908 that concerns us here, when Frieda Weekley was at her closest to Gross, although she would have continued to hear about him from Frick, Else, Frieda Gross and also from Edgar Jaffe who, according to Martin Green, frequented the same cafés as Gross in Munich between 1908 and 1910. Gross’s early psychiatric work had been in the area of what he called the secondary function, by which he meant the mental processes supporting the primary function of consciousness, the associative activities that gave the immediate contents of consciousness their particular depth, range and meaning. His most lasting contribution was to that branch of inquiry known as ‘differential psychology’ whose aim, according to Sonu Shamdasani, was to establish basic ‘types of individuals’;22 and in Die Cerebrale Sekundärfunktion (1902) he had distinguished between two groups of people at different ends of the spectrum of secondary functioning, those with a broad shallow consciousness (verflachtverbreiterte Bewusstsein) and those with a narrow deep consciousness (verengt-vertiefte Bewusstsein) – a distinction that would later feed into Jung’s more famous distinction between extrovert and introvert. It was

8  The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross a differentiation to which Gross very quickly gave evolutionary meaning. By 1907, in concluding his paper to the Amsterdam Congress, he described the verflacht-verbreiterte Bewusstsein as a vestigial type appropriate to primitive cultures, with their need to control ‘multiple, colourfully mixed, unconnected stimuli that pursue one another in quick succession but that are simple in themselves’, and the verengt-vertiefte Bewusstsein as an emergent type appropriate to modern cultures, with their greater need for ‘specialised differentiation’ and ‘increased depth in intellectual pursuits’. This latter type was now itself in a stage of further rapid transformation, producing, as all such evolutionary transformation produces, an excess of unsuccessful over successful adaptation. Cultural development itself leads by selection to the rapid transformation of the dominant mental type, to decadence and to evolution – to an ever greater abundance of decadence, the more powerfully and the more productively the pressure of the need to develop increases. Only when a type loses its consistency, when the stereotype that ensures its survival through hereditary transmission dissolves in a superflux of degeneration, only then does the new appear, first of all as an isolated accident amongst the rampant and disintegrating variations – as a degeneration upwards, amidst the progressive and atavistic creations of decay. 23 Gross was giving a Darwinian context to the decadence that Nietzsche had diagnosed in nineteenth-century German culture. It was an age of ‘productive decadence’, he went on, a decadent culture that bred decadent types, people who were not strong enough either to adapt to their society or resist it, and who therefore succumbed to it. Such neurotic casualties, Gross believed, were potential rebels, the seed-bed of the future, and his mission as a psychoanalyst was to help them, many of them women, in their world-historical struggle. If in the process he saw his own father as the coarse possessor of a verflacht-verbreiterte Bewusstsein and himself as the neurotic victim of a verengt-vertiefte Bewusstsein, he was merely identifying the historical significance of his own family struggle. The book that Gross published in 1907, Das Freud’sche Ideogenitätsmoment und seine Bedeutung im Manisch-Depressivem Irresein Kraepelin’s, gives a good idea of his professional thinking at the time of his affair with Frieda. It begins with an assertion of his monism, but qualifies this immediately by declaring that a belief in the materiality of mind does not mean that all mental illnesses are organic: there are functional illnesses too, and the importance of these is that they highlight the role of history and environment in the development of pathological states of mind. It is here that the professional psychiatrist in Gross welcomes the diagnostic and therapeutic methods of psychoanalysis. What he values in Freud, as we see in the detailed psychoanalytic investigation of a female

The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross  9 kleptomaniac that occupies the middle third of Gross’s book, is that he opens up a space in which to consider the socio-political origins of mental illness; and these origins are traced by Gross to the inhibition of people’s emotional lives. New strong emotions are the means of our growth: being is in a perpetual process of becoming, and each new stimulus, each new emotion, has to be lived through, mastered and assimilated through a pleasurable agon that Gross presents in terms of Nietzsche’s will-topower. Hence his declaration that ‘pleasure is of necessity a transitional form’, only to be experienced ‘through adaptation to perpetually new situations or, in other words, through perpetually new command of perpetually new areas’. 24 Clearly this is a neurology well attuned to the celebration of free love over bourgeois marriage. If the perpetual newness of sexual desire is denied, inhibited or driven from consciousness before it can be assimilated, its energy will be deflected along other associated neurological pathways and set up constellations of overvalued ideas and symbolic values inappropriate to the original stimulus; health will collapse into illness, becoming will fall into decadence. This is Nietzschean neurology, a biological existentialism that seeks to restore what Nietzsche calls ‘the innocence of becoming’ to people made ill by the weight of guilt and shame. 25 The Stirnerian individualism in which Gross was now grounding his ideas represents a complete revaluation of his previous Social Darwinism; where once, like his father, Gross had sacrificed the individual for the good of the community, he was now prepared to sacrifice the community for the good of the individual. This was the lesson he had taken from his own and his patients’ sufferings, which by 1908 he was tracing back to ‘the internalised conflict between self and other’ (‘der ins Innere verlegte Kampf des Eigenen gegen das Fremde’). 26 This is the heart of Gross’s ‘new ethic’: that which is one’s own and proceeds spontaneously from within the self (das Eigene) is the source of all goodness, whilst that which is imposed upon it from without and is alien to the self (das Fremde) is the source of all harm, especially when the conflict between them is internalised and fought out in the depths of the individual soul. This is the characteristic situation of childhood in any culture, Gross believed, especially so under the bullying structures of patriarchy (Vaterrecht); as a result of the defence that Anna Freud later called identification with the oppressor, the child introjects repressive parental authority into itself and becomes internally split, losing continuity of being, experiencing shame at its own desires and suffering from catastrophic loneliness. It is the characteristic situation not only of children but of women too; for the repressiveness of bourgeois sexual morality and bourgeois marriage reactivates within the adult the childhood loneliness that Gross believed endemic in contemporary society. It is no accident that virtually all of Gross’s published case-histories are of women, and doubtless the vulnerability of women under patriarchy was what led him to characterise all

10  The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross imposition of authority from without as rape (Vergewaltigung); it was a metaphor that drove home the sado-masochistic patterns within patriarchal marriage and within patriarchal society more generally. Rousseau had argued that man was born free but was everywhere in chains; Gross thought that man as a species was well-adapted to life but was everywhere in psychological distress, and that the therapist’s job was to rescue individuals from that which was pathogenic and alien to them, and to restore that which was truly their own. As with any responsible advocate of individuality, however, Gross tempered his individualism with a theory of relationship. Emanuel Hurwitz has underlined the importance of relationship to Gross’s ‘new ethic’, and it was clear to his contemporaries too. ‘“Relationship”’, Werfel wrote, fictionalizing Gross as Gebhart in his novel Barbara, ‘- that was Gebhart’s basic idea, the fundamental of his doctrine of the ultimate redemption of mankind. Human relationships had all been corrupted and distorted, simply because, for thousands of years, sex had been distorted and corrupt’.27 Werfel’s portrait of Gross was based on the last years of his life; but already in 1907, Gross had placed himself alongside those Nietzschean immoralists who were struggling ‘to eliminate the concepts of guilt and punishment again and to cleanse psychology, history, nature, social institutions and sanctions of them’.28 Nietzsche had argued that ‘all naturalism in morality, i.e. every healthy morality, is governed by a vital instinct’, and that ‘every expression of contempt for the sexual life, every befouling of it through the concept “impure”, is the crime against life – is the intrinsic sin against the holy spirit of life’.29 For Gross relationship was the cure for loneliness and, in an effort to shake off the categories, ethics and institutions of bourgeois thought, he described it in a dialectical, post-Hegelian way as ‘das reine grosse Dritte’, the pure great third thing that springs up between two independent people, worthy of respect as something spiritual, sacred (als Religion genommen).30 It was a formulation that enabled him to celebrate free love in all its variety, including homosexual love which, when practised alongside heterosexual love, provided the harmonious fulfilment of human bisexuality; homosexuality at its best, he thought, fulfilled an adaptive role by helping us to understand more closely the experiences of the opposite sex. It was the historical mission of psychoanalysis, Gross believed, to emancipate people from the external forms of patriarchal government, as from its internalised repressive authority, so that they might enter upon this paradisal world of new relationships; but for this to happen, psychoanalysis must first emancipate itself. In the first place, it must address itself to the external causes of illness as well as to its internal causes; it must become political, harnessing Freudian techniques to a Nietzschean transvaluation of contemporary values in order to surpass them both. Gross’s understanding of what constituted revolution developed as his life progressed; but psychoanalysis was always the central

The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross  11 agent of social change. ‘The psychology of the unconscious is the philosophy of revolution’, 31 he wrote in 1913, and such revolution was a human hygienic necessity (menschheits-hygienische Notwendigkeit), 32 a neurological necessity if the pathways of the brain that had been blocked by repression were to be re-opened. Second, whilst addressing the external political causes of mental illness, psychoanalysis must also emancipate itself from the same internal repressive authority that damaged its patients; it must learn not to rely upon the transference. After the 1907 Amsterdam conference, where Jung met Gross for the first time, he reported back to Freud on Gross’s therapeutic methods: Dr Gross tells me that he puts a quick stop to the transference by turning people into sexual immoralists. He says the transference to the analyst and its persistent fixation are mere monogamy symbols and as such symptomatic of repression. The truly healthy state for the neurotic is sexual immorality. Hence he associates you with Nietzsche. It seems to me, however, that sexual repression is a very important and indispensable civilizing factor.33 Jung’s own sexual repression would be cruelly exposed a year later in his damaging affair with Sabina Spielrein, begun with Gross’s views explicitly in mind; and when he goes on in his letter to describe the effect of such repression on ‘inferior people’ as pathological, he succumbs to the same callous Social Darwinism which Gross now opposed. It was not ‘inferior people’ who suffered from sexual repression, Gross argued, but the best, those who found it hardest to surrender their individuality. These were the people who most needed protection against the ‘monogamy symbol’ of the transference; and to this end he set out to turn them into sexual immoralists. He set out too to make his practice more informal, less authoritative, analysing people in cafés and bars, conducting mutual analyses and experimenting with the possibilities of group analysis. Gross’s wish to curtail the transference lay at the heart of the new political programme that he was developing for psychoanalysis, and was an implicit critique of Freud’s own position presented in the case-history of Dora, published just two years earlier and the fullest account of the therapeutic role of the transference yet written. Gross was surely amongst the first of many subsequent readers to criticise Freud’s text, and perhaps the first to criticise it on political grounds. Dora, both as girl and woman, had been the victim of an older generation whose dishonesties had finally made her dishonest with herself; as a result she was unable to admit the variety of loves and revenges that she felt towards them, except in disguised form through the psychosomatic disturbances of her own body. Her father in particular had exploited her love and, from Gross’s perspective, Freud’s use of the transference repeated that initial abuse.

12  The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross The transference for Gross was not a therapeutic but a pathogenic relationship, tending to fixate the patient on the analyst, thereby increasing dependency and impeding individuation; Freud, in gathering to his own person the variety of Dora’s emotions and then interpreting them, merely reproduced the original authority of her father. Symbolically, he was preparing her for a future husband, offering himself ‘monogamously’ as the single term within which she must integrate the rich variety of her emotional life. It was this political aspect of integration that Gross deplored as yet another weapon in the patriarchal armoury. It was another form of dishonesty, a betrayal of the infinite diversity of desire, confirming the primal Vergewaltigung at the root of Vaterrecht. For the man and woman of the future, the self would no longer need to be held, as in the transference, by the embrace of one single individual. The new self would be multifoliate, a self of many selves, always ready to unfold in response to the new demands of new relationships. We can see something of the politicised psychoanalysis that Gross was developing in the letter which he published in Die Zukunft on 10 October 1908 about his patient Elisabeth Lang.34 Unlike Freud’s Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, which is a medical case-history written for doctors, Gross’s letter is an open political intervention in a liberal newspaper, using the experience of a named patient to attack the legal powers currently granted to parents over their children during their minority (Elterngewalt). He was successful in securing her release from the asylum to which her parents had confined her; and it was this success, according to Hurwitz, that marked Gross’s final breach with official psychiatry in favour of his own particular style of psychoanalysis.35 His ultimate aim, he told Frieda, was to establish ‘the first legal acknowledgement of the right to the protection of individuality’, and to demonstrate in court that ‘the Philistines are dangerous to health’ (gesundheitsschädlich).36 The letter praises psychoanalysis over the institutional psychiatry that Hermann Lang was forcing on his daughter; but it is a psychoanalysis very different from that practised by Freud in the Dora case. As Steven Marcus has argued, what Dora wanted of Freud was that he confirm her sense of reality by acknowledging the treacherousness of the adults around her; but what Freud wanted of her was that she confirm psychoanalytic theory by admitting her own agency within that web of desire and deceit.37 In discussing the sexual basis of hysteria, the infantile origins of perversion and the universal tendency towards bisexuality, Freud was insisting that conflict was intrinsic to humanity and that its roots lay in infantile sexuality. Gross disagreed. He accepted that the origins of mental illness lay in conflict, but saw that conflict solely in terms of the pathogenic impingements of das Fremde upon das Eigene. It was Elisabeth’s relationship with her parents that caused her trouble. Such a person, he argued, with strong developmental tendencies of her own, was easily harmed by the constraints of others;

The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross  13 and it fell to the analyst, therefore, to confirm her sense of reality, first, by tracing her illness home to the pathogenic family and culture that had caused it, and second, by urging her to discover and act out those desires which they had forced her to repress. For Gross the origins of conflict were not intrapsychic but interpersonal, and he wanted to return psychoanalysis back to the real world where conflict occurred. He believed that there was an ‘innate morality of the unconscious’, 38 that instincts were adaptive and not perverse and that infantile sexuality was the result of abusive parenting. Clearly there was no place in Gross’s scheme for the Oedipus complex as a universal experience. This is something to be borne in mind when we return to that first meeting of Frieda Weekley and Lawrence, when they talked of Oedipus and understanding leapt through their words. What Frieda brought to that discussion, and to the many discussions that followed it, so important for the shaping of Sons and Lovers, may have been orthodox Freudian doctrine or it may have been Gross’s critique of it; for she would have known both.

IV Gross’s Letters to Frieda Weekley and Else Jaffe (1907–08) If Gross’s professional and journalistic writings present the theory of his ‘new ethic’, his correspondence with Frieda Weekley and her sister Else Jaffe in 1907–08 reveals it in practice. The perfervidity of his prose suggests a man defiantly striving to realise his vision of the future in the face of crippling doubt; the fond, cautious replies of Frieda and Else make clear that his attractiveness as a person and thinker could not allay their doubt either. ‘What kind of a bird was this?’ Frieda must have asked herself the same question about Otto Gross that she would later ask about Lawrence, as both she and her sister struggled, sympathetically, to understand the dangerous alluring paradoxes of the man they loved. Gross was, and still is, vulnerable to the kind of dismissive psychologism and pathologisation that beset people who put themselves beyond the sexual, political and professional norms of their society. In 1914, in a letter smuggled out of a mental hospital where he was being detained against his will, he himself declared it intolerable to find ‘that all the striving of my life, everything for which I have lived, is devalued as pathological, that the motives that direct my life are not taken seriously’.39 Yet his best critics worked hard to respect the paradoxes that flowed from his revaluation of transgressive action and desire; they puzzled to make sense of his idealistic struggle to overthrow the idealism, the ‘ignorance in physiologis’,40 that sustained the existing social order. In this section I consider the efforts made by some of his circle to tease out their ambivalence about Gross and his ideas, beginning with Frieda Weekley and Else Jaffe before finally turning to the judgements of some of the liberal academics and analysts amongst whom he moved.41

14  The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross All Gross’s letters to Frieda are undated, as though he were more at home in the mythological landscape and chronology which they inhabit rather than in actual time and place. Eagerly they strive towards a sunny life on the heights of individual fulfilment and shared sexual liberation, revelling in ‘the deep, passionate, springtide intoxication of people born before their time’ (191). Their love is a prefigurement of the time to come; it is ‘an intoxication of the senses’, says Gross, ‘the true Dionysiac’ (190), rescuing the individual from the loneliness of bourgeois life and redeeming its culture from the asceticism, jealousy and denial that sustain it.42 These are declarations which attack the renunciation so dear to German liberals since the days of Goethe; and more particularly, under the aegis of the erotic they attack the asceticism espoused by Max Weber. One striking letter reads like the manifesto of the love that he and Frieda shared, the mythical charter spelling out its future terms and conditions. This is letter A, and it is structured by an antithesis that lies deep in European male Romantic writing and that originates in the polarising logic of depression: the woman is placed in a state of joy from which the man fears his exclusion. It begins by celebrating Frieda as a ‘golden child’, as ‘the only human being who already, today, has remained free from the code of chastity, from Christianity, from democracy and all that accumulated filth’. She is ‘the woman of the future’ who, with her loving and laughter, has kept herself free from ‘the curse and dirt of two gloomy millennia’ (165). Frieda embodies for Gross the Nietzschean ideal of an aristocratic post-Christian sexuality which is both innocent and free, and the proof of this lies in the new way that she has found to live in time: ‘with you only the present minute and the future is true, whatever has been before is left behind, for you redeem us from all that is past’ (174). Gross’s first-person plural here (‘us’) suggests not only the inspirational role that Frieda played in the little group of three women whom Gross was then loving but also the evangelical role that she might play in the larger history of the world. Her joy in living – what Ibsen would have called her livsglaede – had the power to bring redemption from guilt and remorse, salvation from the tragedy of an ascetic and repressive patriarchal history. Frieda, of course, was too shrewd to see herself as a salvator mundi in quite this way; yet she was moved by the role in which Gross cast her. He awoke in her ‘the consciousness of my proper self’, she said, made her confident in her dissatisfaction with her bourgeois marriage, and excited her with ‘his vision of a new society’.43 She was the new adaptation, the prophet whose talent for living prefigured a new way of life for the whole human race, whilst he was the dependent, damaged visionary, the neurotic with the verengt-vertiefte Bewusstsein whose liberation she could assist. It was a role that flattered her self-image, and she re-enacted it many times later, not least in her relationship with Lawrence. Gross’s letters mattered enormously to her. She longed for them to come, under

The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross  15 cover of letters from her sister’s husband; she found herself unable to burn them when they arrived, as she had promised; she sent some of them to her husband to explain why she was beginning a new kind of life with Lawrence; and she kept them by her always until her death. Hence their eventual survival. Yet she could see clearly that Gross’s description of her was both idealised and prescriptive. Like all mythical charters, the contents of his letter were coercive, transforming her into the kind of woman he wanted her to be. In another way of looking, this ‘woman of the future’, whom Gross was pressing to come to Munich to embrace a new way of life, resembled an adulteress in an old nineteenth-century novel, having an affair whilst hanging on to husband, home and children. If flattered by Gross’s words, Frieda knew he overrated her, and she wondered why. In one of her fragmentary replies we can see her trying to puzzle him out: ‘I have to keep thinking about you and I’m still not clear in my own mind’.44 If Lawrence’s 1920 novel Mr Noon is to be believed, she was still puzzling over him in 1912. Clearly there was something about Gross’s mind and prose that made her uneasy. She may have told him that ‘it’s really the theoretician that I love most of all in you’, but in fact she found his theorising too abstract. She objected to being treated as a type rather than as an individual; she objected to the academic impersonality of his prose; and she objected too that, despite all his talk about joy, he lacked ‘the harmless spontaneous joy that bubbles over like a fountain’. He was, she thought, like Hamlet, ‘too sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’. Idealised as a new woman herself, Frieda responded by casting Gross as a 300-year-old tragic hero. Easily and adroitly, still obeying the polarising logic of his depression, Gross refuted Frieda’s charge of being over-theoretical: ‘you confer the wonderful power both to be a real human being and at the same time to live out an idea’, he told her (188). But his theoretical ‘idea’ excited him greatly, and the emphases that underscore his prose bear witness to his need to live out his values, dangerously to the uttermost, in order to realise their truth. His attachment to his ideas and idealisations was ‘romantic’ in the all-or-nothing spirit of a character from Ibsen or Conrad, and hence his self-dramatisation in the heroic terms of late nineteenthcentury Romantic literature. Could he exorcise the ‘ghosts’ of his past and see the sun of a new age rise? Could he count himself amongst the ‘new generation’ that was to enter the ‘Promised Land’ of the future (166)? The ever-present threat of tragedy, the ‘peril and danger of the quest’ (166), was caused by the repressiveness of ‘the Epoch of Decadence’ (Decadenceepoche) in which he lived (189); and the role of psychoanalysis was to challenge him with his own unconscious as Stein had challenged Lord Jim in Conrad’s novel: ‘The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up’.45 The most heroic willing and striving were needed to overthrow the old repressive order

16  The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross of Christian morality, liberal democracy and bourgeois family-life; only then would the new world of the healthy Übermensch be realised in all its potential. As Leonhard Frank has one of Gross’s admirers say in his novel Links wo das Herz ist, ‘“No doubt Nietzsche and Freud will enable us to clear the way for the uninhibited, complex-free superman. That is the burning problem of this epoch. When we have solved it we shall live dangerously in complete freedom”’.46 The dangers lay both without, in the punishment of those transgressions that make revolutionaries dangerous to the public (gemeingefährlich), and within, in what Gross called the ‘paralyzing doubts about the future of mankind and the value of my own efforts’ (165). Did his desires bear the taint of the age or transcend it? At first Gross’s great adventure seemed to flourish. In Letter G we see him at the height of his success, enjoying ‘his Zarathustra moment’ as his relationships with both Friedas and with Else all prosper: ‘Oh you Beloved’, he writes, ‘it seems to me as though on all horizons there were suns rising’ (173). But then suddenly in Letter H, in a characteristic peripeteia, everything collapses, as a result, he thought, of the sisterly jealousy between Frieda and Else. Their last meeting, Frieda told him, had been ‘quite in the manner of “Brunhild and Krimhild”’ (196), the rival queens of the Nibelungenlied whose quarrel over the respective merits of their husbands laid waste the chivalric ideal of their civilisation. Else had chosen a new lover whom she wanted to introduce to their little commune but, with a perversity born of jealousy, had chosen a democrat, a man in whom Gross, with his belief in what Nietzsche called the ‘pathos of distance’,47 had found his nemesis. I have had far too much of the most wonderful happiness of all – a happiness too high for the human condition – I have felt in myself too much creative power, too many high intentions – there is a sentence in Heraclitus that is dreadfully true: the sun dare not exceed the bounds of its course – otherwise the spirits of revenge would seize it. (173) Else’s relapse into democratic politics, her return to a Heidelberg High Society culture of Weberian asceticism (Socialaskese),48 seemed to him, as in a Romantic tragedy of idealism, a betrayal of the founding ideal of his own sense of civilisation. Interestingly, however, he submitted the old language of classical and Romantic tragedy to the new discipline of Freudian psychoanalysis – and submitted Else, perhaps rightly, to the pathologisation he would resist for himself. The destiny whose ‘satanic irony’ and ‘hateful scornful poisonous vampires’ pursued him (174) was, in another language, the predetermined return of repressed jealous ‘hatred’ in Else’s unconscious (176). Despite her flirtation with the livsglaede of post-Nietzschean sexual liberation, Gross argued, Else was in reality wedded to the repressive forces of democratic liberalism; she

The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross  17 was enamoured of the ‘ascetic self-misunderstanding’ which Nietzsche saw as a defence against the depletions wrought by ‘physiological inhibition’ and, therefore, by definition, as a sin against life.49 Unsettled and threatened by her betrayal, he responded by assuming the role of hero in a tragedy of destiny, a Schicksalstragödie such as Freud had found in Oedipus Rex; and in so doing he transformed himself in effect into the first Freudian tragic hero of the twentieth century. In Letter H Gross seems quickly to recover from his ‘deep depression’ through the joy that he finds in his ‘sunny woman’ Frieda;50 but the doubt that all these letters raise, in their willing and striving, their strenuous emphases and underlinings, is that Gross’s insistence upon joy was a defence against pain and loneliness, a longing for the future that was in reality a denial of the past. This was certainly the view of Ferenczi when he wrote to Freud of a patient’s ‘manic production of pleasure along the lines of Gross’;51 Gross’s theories about life, we might say, were unconsciously designed to protect himself against a lack of ‘harmless spontaneous joy’ within it. Perhaps his ‘new ethic’ hides an old wound, and his idealisation of Frieda as the ‘woman of the future’ disguises his jealous rage at the women of his own past infancy, as Wilhelm Stekel thought.52 Always the letters speak of a man just cured, just made whole; they have a redemptive urgency which suggests that, at the heart of all his Nietzschean willing and striving, there lies a profound insecurity, an intolerable anxiety, a fear of psychic disintegration. As Else told Frieda, whilst conceding Gross’s incomparability as a lover and his charisma as a man, ‘you have to see the tremendous shadows around the light’.53 Frieda, however, remained perplexed. She was deeply attracted by Gross’s sexual politics, and accepted his views of the primacy of the sexual instinct in adult mental life, the dangers of its repression, the origins of perversion in the ‘sublimation’ of sexuality into non-sexual activities, and the mean-spiritedness of patriarchal jealousy. She too ‘could not accept society’, she felt herself different from the people around her, and Gross offered her a new political vision which she could not simply pathologise. ‘Otto is the Prophet’, she told Else, probably in the summer of 1907, ‘of whom it must be said, He who is not for me is against me’,54 and of this new erotic dispensation Frieda became a disciple. On her return to Nottingham she even tried to set up a little erotic community amongst her friends, devoted to free love.55 Her efforts, however, did not silence her doubts either about Gross or about herself. She found him too theoretical and, despite all his exhortations, did not leave her husband for him. Thirty years later, in “Not I, But the Wind…”, as we have seen, she saw her younger self not as a disciple but as a person full of ‘undigested theories’, who ‘fanatically believed that if only sex were “free” the world would straightaway turn into a paradise’. Later still, in her Memoirs, she wrote that she fell in love with Gross’s ‘vision of a new society’ and ‘his new approach to human problems’, but added that

18  The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross ‘something was wrong in him; he did not have his feet on the ground of reality’.56 He was too theoretical altogether, a dealer in fanatical hopes; and the fanatic is, as Nietzsche observed, ‘the antithetical type of the strong, emancipated spirit’.57 The charge of fanaticism runs like a fugal theme through almost all contemporary accounts of Gross; it encapsulates his dangerous appeal, the ultimately disappointing glamour of his challenge. Franz Werfel and Leonhard Frank were both admirers who lost faith in him; Werfel fictionalised him as Gebhart whose ‘blue, enthusiast’s eyes’ shone with ‘that direct simplicity of children one so often meets in the eyes of a fanatic’, whilst Frank followed suit later in his own portrayal of Gross in Links wo das Herz ist: Dr. Kreuz, thirty and married, had studied psychiatry at the University of Graz. The upper part of his face – blue, childish, innocent eyes, a hooked nose and full lips that were always a little apart, as though, noiselessly panting for breath, he carried all the woes of the world on his shoulders – was out of harmony with the feeble chin, barely distinguishable, that lost itself in his neck. No one could easily forget that fanatical, birdlike face, which seemed to consist of faintly tinted china. Dr. Kreuz was familiar with Nietzsche’s philosophy and felt it deeply. He was one of the first disciples of Freud.58 The paradoxical status of the Romantic tragic hero, profoundly guilty in his innocence, is here inscribed directly upon the body of Gross’s fictional counterpart: he is the salvator mundi who is too feeble to save himself, the champion of Eros who possesses the fragility of chinaware and no chin. Both men clearly felt that Gross was adventuring upon the future with what Ibsen called ‘a corpse in the cargo’;59 there was a mote in his eye that blinded him at the point of seeing, so that his ideals were tarnished in the moment of their conception. It was as Frieda Weekley had already sensed: the feet of the fanatic are not set ‘on the ground of reality’. His eyes are set on the future because he has been damaged in the past – and yet the future matters. The fanatic may see further and more clearly than the man who stands on the ground of present realities; his challenge of all-or-nothing shames the compliance of compromise and accommodationism, and ensures his lasting symbolic value. There is always a place for the fanatic in the dialectic of history; like that of Gregers Werle in the concluding line of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, it is ‘to be thirteenth at table’. * In their rhetoric Gross’s letters to Else resemble those to Frieda; with the lavish generosity of the erotic, he shared himself impersonally between

The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross  19 them. But with Else he was more melancholy and more intellectual than with Frieda, and their letters offer an interesting glimpse into the philosophical debates that arose between Gross and the Weber circle in 1906 and 1907. Gross probably sent Else a copy of the first part of his lost paper Über psychologistische Herrschaftsordnung (‘The Hierarchy of Social Power in its Psychological Dimension’), in which he discussed Der Psychologismus seit Nietzsche und Freud (‘Psychology after Nietzsche and Freud’);60 and the debate that surrounded this essay left its traces in the letters, and became implicated in Else’s rejection of Gross, personally and ideologically. In particular Gross declares clearly to Else how he grounds his ethic and erotic creed in the biological imperatives of the body. When he told her that ‘your body is holy to me for all time’,61 he was expressing not only a lover’s adoration but also a doctor’s reverence for the sacredness of human sexuality, for the physiological vitality of instincts in their reactions to the stimuli of the surrounding world. The same idealisation of the body that justified his desire for Else also justified his disgust, his ‘physical aversion’, for her new democratic lover, the surgeon Dr.  Völcker: ‘Here a real instinct is alive in me – a law which has become flesh, a law of the unique, age-old and immortal sexual morality demanded by life itself – the higher breeding instinct of the separation of the castes’.62 This instinct was incarnate in the life of the body, absolute beyond argument, he believed, with the power to overturn Kantian traditions of morality and Weberian traditions of asceticism, to replace the rape and repression that sustained bourgeois marriage with the new world of the erotic: You see – this is my leading ideal – the great elemental force of the soul, the erotic must be like water – blessing, fructifying, loved, mastered  – and that is my guiding knowledge: He who rapes the erotic, the erotic will rape him. Only he who recognises the erotic and affirms it, as it actually is – only he masters it, even to the extent that he can promise to be always himself.63 Once again the fervency of the writing suggests the fear that lies behind it; for all his faith in scientific fact and knowledge, Gross’s comparison of the erotic to water epitomises his reliance on poetic language to dissolve the old categories of Wilhelmine reality. Like a prophet, he must first overthrow the world in language before it can be overthrown in fact; and it is to the poetry of that other prophet, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, that he turns for inspiration. Troubled by ‘dark and great passions’, Gross tells Else that he glories in the ‘pure air’ of her love; and in so doing he places himself in the same mythological landscape as Zarathustra who, amidst mountain heights, had declared: ‘all existence here wants to become words, all becoming here wants to learn speech from me’.64

20  The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross It was the prophetic cast to Gross’s mind that Else finally seized upon in order to explain to herself what she could not accept in him. In her own way she loved him, and as late as 1909 could tell his wife Frieda Gross that she envied all the years that she had had with him; 65 but like her sister she saw that life with him was impossible. She was, Gross knew, divided against herself: ‘there must be two souls which alternate in you,’ he told her, with the Erotik on one side and Socialaskese on the other. Like Marlow in Heart of Darkness, she yearned romantically for the fullness of living dangerously but denied herself out of the belief that ‘life does not allow us to live without compromises’, without self-sacrifice.66 In the spirit of the Heidelberg circle to which she belonged, she told Gross that she found him morally unimportant (klein), of no account before the categorical imperative of the moral law; and this angered him, since his life was dedicated to all that was heroic and great (gross) in the power of the erotic. Her sharpest criticism comes in a long letter dating probably from 15 December 1907,67 nine days before she gave birth to their child, and it shows her criticising his prophetic manner in a way characteristic of Weber and his circle. Else, like Frieda, had clearly puzzled over the paradoxes with which Otto Gross presented his friends, not least because of his morphine addiction: ‘You know yourself’, she told him, ‘how difficult it is for another person to work you out!’ Yet she had come to the conclusion that his all-or-nothing faith in the erotic was wrong because it consumed the individuality of the lover in the fire of the prophet, the quiddity of the beloved in the disciple: ‘the prophet has consumed in his fire the last remnants of the human being, Otto, and has taken from him the capacity to love persons individually in their individuality and according to their essence’. This was not what Else called love and, if Gross’s sexual ethics placed him beyond the social norm, his definition of love placed him beyond the linguistic community of her Heidelberg friends. Furthermore, she went on, the shortcomings of Gross’s mind – ‘the want of discrimination, the lack of nuance and capacity to distinguish individual human beings’ – fell hardest upon his wife who, knowing him as she did, could not ‘completely believe’. He was abusing psychoanalysis in trying to make her believe, she implied, and the mere fact of the attempt served to show how much his sense of prophetic mission had blinded him to the facts that his love for his wife had declined, and that he no longer cared for his child. Gross’s reply was characteristic, answering Else’s implicit charge of fanaticism with the claim that he was now utterly transformed: yes, once he had worn ‘that gray and misty mantle’ and in Amsterdam had displayed ‘the fatal fanaticism and the fatal gestures of the Prophet’, but now he had matured and recognised that ‘every tendency to prophecy is an expression of self-falsification’.68 It had been an alien style to him, and the aim of his psychoanalysis now was ‘to free the essential personal

The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross  21 style of the individual from all that is alien, destructive, contradictory’. His whole professional life now, he said, was devoted to ‘the development of individuality and insight into one’s individuality’, as revealed in ‘the rhythm that moves in a human life, in every least movement of the body and every involuntary expression of fleeting feeling’. Gross’s statement was powerful, but it would not have satisfied Else, who found him ruthless, evangelical, theoretical and prescriptive. It was the statement of a man who wanted to be saved in language because he was afraid he could not be saved in life, a poetic statement that could not stoop to accommodate the prosaic demands for compromise that ordinarily characterise parental and sexual relationships. There was no space in Gross’s erotic vocabulary for the Heidelberg language of discipline and duty, restraint and responsibility. * It was probably Else who introduced Otto and Frieda Gross to Max and Marianne Weber, and Marianne has left a fascinating record of the efforts that she and her husband made, as older liberals, to come to terms with the libertarianism of a new generation ‘related to the Romantics in their intellectual impulses’.69 She acknowledged the charismatic qualities of Gross, the ‘magic’ of his ‘brilliant mind and heart’ as he struggled for his ‘idea’ against the ‘idea’ of Freud; and she saw too the charm in living dangerously – in opting ‘to shape one’s future entirely on the basis of one’s own nature, to let the currents of life flow through one and then to bear the consequences’. Such ‘adventurism’, however, was alien both to her nature and beliefs, and she would probably have endorsed Conrad’s condemnation of ‘the adventurer’s easy morality which takes count of personal risk in the ethical appraising of his action’.70 In her view the categorical imperative of the Kantian moral law was universally binding, and its breach incurred guilt. For the Webers of 1907, fidelity within marriage was such an imperative, and the attack on law, duty and asceticism in the name of free love was mistaken. Marianne declared her sympathy for ‘the unhappy lives that prepared the ground for such misleading teachings’ and, as a feminist, she agreed that the sexual conventions that bred prostitution, and the sacrifice and self-sacrifice of women, needed reform. But she distrusted the supposed sexual egalitarianism of free love, seeing it as in the interest only of men. Max too commented tartly on the irony that women were defending ‘an ethics that would benefit only men’. To Gross the erotic expressed the sexual instinct in all its regenerative power, able to restore neurotic men and women to full health in a reconstituted society; but to the Webers, who saw instincts as ‘value-neutral’, the erotic was no more than the sublimation of the sexual instinct into a specialised principle of taste.

22  The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross It was primarily Gross’s attempt to ground ethics in the instinctual life of the body that provoked Max Weber to write Else his long exasperated letter of 13 September 1907,71 arguing against the publication of Gross’s essay Über psychologistische Herrschaftsordnung in his Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. Gross’s attempt, in Weber’s view, betrayed the research specialism of the natural scientist with the Weltanschauung of the moralist. Science, he thought, should be value-free. This, of course, is not wholly true, and medicine and morality are not in any final sense separate. Gross, however, had inverted the hygienic teachings of Social Darwinists and turned them into an anarchist hygienic morality of his own. From his studies in psychiatry and psychoanalysis he had developed an instinct theory arguing that nerve-pathways were damaged by repression and that, therefore, on medical grounds, the promptings of desire should always be obeyed. This virtual coincidence of morality and neurology infuriated Weber, who believed that ought and is belong to different categories of thought and that ethics could not be derived from psychology. He was outraged by the suggestion that morality might be a branch of hygiene, and refused ‘to accept the neurologist as an authority’ in assessing the ethical value of human actions. Following a hygienic impulse of his own, he dismissed Gross’s paper as a nappy, a diaper containing the infantile waste of a new-born science still in the process of growing up; and he set out to destroy its intellectual pretensions. In the first place, he pointed out the simple distinction which Gross was ignoring between suppression and repression – a distinction which enabled Weber to reclaim the ethical value of self-restraint. Second, he deplored the exorbitation of the concept of abreaction in Gross; the term used by Freud to signify the release of repressed emotions attached to specific traumas, whether released spontaneously or during a psychoanalytic encounter, was misused by Gross to describe the release of suppressed sexual emotions within sexual encounters, in a way that enabled him to theorise sexuality as a kind of therapy and mental hygiene.72 Third, more philosophically, Weber suspected that Gross, in blaming ‘absolute values’ for mental illness, had mistaken social rules of behaviour for universal rules of thought, and he derided the shabby relativism with which Gross sought to replace those rules.73 There are no nuances in Gross’s system, he declared, using the same word that Else had used: if morality were a branch of hygiene, and if everyone were to act out their desires, everyone would be morally equivalent, and the utilitarian quantifying of the ‘cost’ to our nerves would be the only ethical issue involved in the judgement of action. Elsewhere Weber also challenged the tendency within such ‘nerve-ethics’ to abstract the instinct out of the concrete human relationships through which alone it may be recognised in all ‘its dignity or lack of dignity’.74

The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross  23 In a private letter to Marianne, Weber expressed the suspicions withheld from his more official letter urging rejection of Gross’s essay. ‘All these people are really entangled in a powerful web of gross self-deceptions’ (gröblicher Selbsttäuschungen), he wrote;75 their lack of nuanced intelligence was a symptom – ‘as every psychiatrist must confirm’  – of mental illness, and their ignorance of their own unconscious motivation found its natural counterpoise in the ‘Fanatismus’ of their ideology. Sam Whimster sees Weber’s judgements as ‘crude psychological reductionism’;76 this may be so, but values are held by people, and despite the dangers of pathologisation, it is not unreasonable to refer a belief to the nature of the person holding it. Once again we return to that paradoxical interplay between person and belief that so many people acknowledged in discussing Gross. Both Max and Marianne Weber liked him, and confessed the magic and charisma of his presence; but when Max concluded his rejection letter with the judgement that Gross’s article was not a scientific article but a sermon, and ‘a bad sermon’ at that, he was expressing his belief that Gross’s charisma was compromised. Nor was his allegation about Gross’s unconscious motivation simply the result of prejudice or bad faith; it was confirmed in a literary judgement of Gross’s prose. In Weber’s view the cogency of Gross’s attack on bourgeois values and the imaginative reach of his eroticism were vitiated by poor writing, and such poor writing and poor thinking in an obviously intelligent man aroused his suspicion. The prophet had proved himself a fanatic by his failure to master the one ethical imperative of his profession – the imperative to know himself. From Weber’s perspective Gross had, like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, ‘kicked himself loose of the earth’77 and, in so doing, had placed himself beyond the pale of the established moral community. The following spring Gross found himself placed beyond the pale of the established psychoanalytic community as well. Sometime in the autumn or winter of 1907–08, Gross suffered a relapse into morphine addiction; and Freud and Jung agreed between them that, after the Salzburg Congress of Psychoanalysis in April, Gross would enter the Burghölzli where Jung worked in order to undertake a drug-cure, after which Freud would take him into analysis. He was, Freud thought, ‘a gifted, resolute man’ in the first stages of ‘toxic cocaine paranoia’.78 When Gross entered the Burghölzli, however, things quickly went astray. An intense friendship flared up between Jung and Gross which, as Hurwitz shows,79 tempted Jung – in an act of rivalry that breached medical etiquette as well as his personal arrangement with Freud – to take over Gross’s treatment himself. The analysis went swimmingly at first, and Jung boasted of his progress; Gross was ‘like my twin brother’, he felt (156). Freud, however, suspected both the clinical speed of the cure and also the intensity of the relationship between the two younger men; he could perhaps detect the whiff of anti-patriarchal rebellion in the air. Jung was impressed not

24  The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross only by Gross’s theory of psychological types, his individualism, and presumably his hostility to Freud’s theory of the sexual origins of the neuroses; he was aroused too by his sexual immoralism. Sabina Spielrein, Jung’s patient at that time, told Freud later how he arrived ‘beaming with pleasure, and tells me with strong emotion about Gross, about the great insight he has just received (i.e. about polygamy); he no longer wants to suppress his feeling for me’.80 Freud was right to be suspicious; the bohemian ‘fight-the-father’ spirit (Vaterbekämpfung) that Jung diagnosed in both Gross and Spielrein was proving to be dangerously contagious (229). Then, much as Freud must have foreseen, the inevitable happened: Gross leapt over the garden wall and absconded from the Burghölzli, leaving Jung to face Freud with the fact of his failure. This he did with characteristic brutality by blaming not himself but his patient: despite having earlier agreed a diagnosis with Freud of ‘obsessional neurosis’ (151–2), he now declared Gross to be suffering from the incurable and degenerative condition of dementia praecox – a condition which was his own speciality, in which Freud had already conceded his expertise. Freud remonstrated delicately, asking whether it might not rather be a case of ‘(obsessional) psychoneurosis, with negative transference caused by his hostility to his father, which presents the appearance of absence or impairment of transference?’ (158). It was a plausible, sympathetic diagnosis, if open to challenge from Gross’s own perspective on the transference. Jung, however, sensing the state of Freud’s loyalties, held firm to his diagnosis of dementia praecox, and Freud backed off, anxious not to alienate his most valuable follower and preferring instead to sacrifice Gross. Gross is an addict and ‘can only do great harm to our cause’ (162), he conceded. It was a revealing, unhappy outcome for all three men. Jung dealt with his ambivalence towards the temptations offered by Gross’s ideas by punishing him, and by hating him for the rest of his life;81 Freud – less split, more integrated, fond of Gross and his adventurousness  – sacrificed him to his ambition for the future of psychoanalysis; and Gross found himself excluded from mainstream analytic circles until his death. His subversive ideas and personality had not been without their effect: he had exacerbated the tensions between Jung and Freud that would culminate in their final quarrel and separation in 1912. But for himself the combined effect of Jung’s brutal pathologisation and Freud’s more subtle betrayal had labelled him with a catastrophically false diagnosis which his father was able to utilise in 1913 to strip him of his citizen’s rights, a devastating blow from whose damaging social consequences he never recovered. The patriarchal world, threatened, had puzzled over his case, made its diagnosis, ducked his challenge and closed its doors against him.

The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross  25 It was the writer Franz Jung, perhaps Gross’s closest friend, who produced the most striking, most sympathetic account of Gross and his ideas. In a long essay of 1921, designed as an introduction to an edition of Gross’s works that was never completed, he traced Gross’s difficulties to his difficulties with his father, and showed how, after his father’s death in 1916, Otto became not only impoverished but also increasingly infantilised, as though devoted to his own decline, destroyed by the guilty realisation of his deepest oedipal desire. It was a moment that might epitomise what Freud, in ‘Some Character-Types Met with in PsychoAnalytic Work’ (1916), called a tragedy of success. But Jung undercut this analytic diagnosis with a literary perspective that was deliberately subversive: the moment stands in his account as a symbol of Gross’s life as a whole, of all the fundamental ambiguities that characterised his tragedy of success (Tragik des Erfolges, deren Doppelsinnigkeit).82 In the purity of adherence to his new ethic, Gross had separated himself so far from the compromises of common humanity that he could find no way back; in being true to himself, he had brought himself to an end, where the only compromise left was death. It was a tragedy – and yet it was a success. In the purity of his adherence to his ethic, in the extremism of his attack on a corrupt patriarchy, he had exposed its injustices; he had invalidated the conventional diagnostics, spurious hygiene and political accommodationism of both medicine and morality. The symbolic power of his life and death remained undiminished; already at that long table of the first psychoanalytic congress of 1908, the unwelcome guest, the ‘thirteenth at table’ had denounced the depoliticisation of psychoanalysis; and despite the diagnoses heaped upon him, Franz Jung thought his attack unanswerable. In Ferenczi’s phrase about Gross, it was precisely the role of ‘extremists’ and ‘fanatics’ to ‘pop up here and there as a “Golem”’,83 to table those questions that no-one else would raise and to challenge the fundamental assumptions and institutions of their society. That was their triumph, and that would be their tragedy. * Like Franz Jung, Frieda Weekley had remained true to her ambivalence in the face of the paradoxes presented by Gross. Though ‘not clear in my own mind’, she had struggled sympathetically to understand him. She suspected the theoretical nature of his ideas, found him ‘“sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought”’ and lacking in ‘harmless spontaneous joy’; yet still she kept alive ‘my warm little flame, that burns with enthusiasm for your ideals’.84 She was determined to hold fast to das Eigene amidst das Fremde of her Nottinghamshire life. In her own words, which echo those of Gross, though ‘living like a somnambulist in a conventional set life’, she was determined to be true to ‘my own proper self’

26  The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross (das Eigene). That warm little flame of hers continued to burn throughout her attempts to set up a commune of free love in Nottingham, her affair with Ernst Frick in 1911 and her affair with Lawrence in 1912 when he too ‘had done with his past life’ and was searching for new ways of living. It burned in her desire, when first in Germany in 1912, to follow the examples of her sister and Frieda Gross and set up as a free woman; and it would continue to burn throughout her subsequent relationship with Lawrence. As a result Otto Gross and his vision of ‘a new form of living’ would continue to ‘pop up here and there as a “Golem”’ in Lawrence’s life too, informing and complicating his relationship with psychoanalysis and compelling him – as so many others before him – to assess the value of Gross’s ideas in the paradoxical, ambiguous light cast by the man who had originated them.

Notes

The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross  27

12 13 14 15 16

17

18

19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27

Green, Otto Gross: Freudian Psychoanalyst 1877–1920 (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999); Jennifer E. Michaels, Anarchy and Eros: Otto Gross’s Impact on German Expressionist Writers (New York: Peter Lang, 1983); and, particularly, Gottfried Heuer, Freud’s “Outstanding Colleague” / Jung’s “Twin Brother”: The Suppressed Psychoanalytic and Political Significance of Otto Gross (London: Routledge, 2017), a personal examination of everything currently known about Gross. For a bibliography of Gross’s works and secondary material, see Raimund Dehmlow and Gottfried Heuer, Otto Gross: Werkverzeichnis and Sekundärschrifttum (Hannover: Laurentius, 1999). A good selection of Gross’s works in a somewhat literal translation is Otto Gross: Selected Works 1901–1920, ed. and trans. by Lois L. Madison (Hamilton, NY: Mindpiece, 2012). Green, The von Richthofen Sisters, p. 35. See Heuer, Freud’s “Outstanding Colleague” / Jung’s “Twin Brother”, pp. 59, 161. For Gross’s connexions with academic psychiatry, see Michael Turnheim ‘Otto Gross und die Deutsche Psychiatrie’, in his book Freud und der Rest (Vienna: Turia & Kant, 1993), pp. 71–118. Green, The von Richthofen Sisters, p. 38. For Ascona, see in particular Robert Landmann, Ascona – Monte Verità. Auf der Suche nach dem Paradies (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1976), and Martin Green, Mountain of Truth. The Counterculture begins. Ascona, 1900–1920 (Hanover: University of New England Press, 1986). Sam Whimster with Gottfried Heuer, ‘Otto Gross and Else Jaffé and Max Weber’, in Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 15 nos. 3–4 (1998), p. 134; John Turner, with Cornelia Rumpf-Worthen and Ruth Jenkins, The Otto Gross – Frieda Weekley Correspondence: Transcribed, Translated and Annotated, in The D.H. Lawrence Review, vol. 22 no. 2 (Summer, 1990), p. 197. See Weber’s letter to Else Jaffe, dated 13 September 1907, mentioned in my next paragraph, where he rejected Gross’s article on his new ethic as unsuitable for publication in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik whilst confessing the nobility of his personal charisma (‘der Adel seines persönliches Charisma’s’). In Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe, Bd. II/5, Briefe 1906–8, ed. by M. Rainer Lepsius and Wolfgang J. Mommsen with Birgit Rudhard and Manfred Schön (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1990), p. 402. Turner et al., p. 174. Gross reported Freud’s words in his article ‘Ludwig Rubiners “Psychoanalyse”’, in Die Aktion, Bd. 3 (1913), Sp. 507. Otto Gross, ‘Anmerkungen zu einer neuen Ethik’, in Die Aktion, Bd. 3 (1913), Sp. 1142. Sonu Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 43. Otto Gross, ‘Die cerebrale Sekundärfunktion’, in Compte Rendu des Travaux du 1er Congrès International de Psychiatrie, de Neurologie, de Psychologie et de l’Assistance des aliénés, tenu à Amsterdam du 2 à 7 Septembre 1907 (Amsterdam: de Bussy, 1908), p. 596. Otto Gross, Das Freud’sche Ideogenitätsmoment und seine Bedeutung im Manisch-Depressivem Irresein Kraepelin’s (Leipzig: F.C.W. Vogel, 1907), p. 14. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. by Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), VI 8, p. 32. Otto Gross, ‘Elterngewalt’, in Die Zukunft, Bd. 65 (1908), p. 79. Franz Werfel, Barbara oder die Frömmigkeit (1929) trans. by Geoffrey Dunlop as The Pure in Heart (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931), p. 345.

28  The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross 28 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, VI 7, p. 31. 29 Ibid., V 4, p.  23; Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, trans. by R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 77. 30 Gross, ‘Anmerkungen zu einer neuen Ethik’, Sp. 1142; ‘Notiz über Beziehungen’, in Die Aktion, Bd. 3 (1913), Sp. 1180. 31 Otto Gross, ‘‘Zur Überwindung der kulturellen Krise’, in Die Aktion, Bd. 3 (1913), Sp. 384, trans. by John Turner, in Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, ed. by Robert Graham, 3 vols (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2005), I, p. 281. 32 Otto Gross, ‘Die Psychoanalyse oder wir Kliniker’, in Die Aktion, Bd. 3 (1913), Sp. 632. 33 Jung to Freud, 25 September 1907, in The Freud / Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, ed. by William McGuire, trans. by Ralph Manheim and R.F.C. Hull (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 90. 34 See n. 26 above. 35 See Hurwitz, pp. 89, 207–12. 36 Turner et al., p. 190. 37 See Steven Marcus, ‘Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History’ (1974), repr. in In Dora’s Case: Freud – Hysteria – Feminism, ed. by C. Bernheimer and C. Kahane (London: Virago, 1985), pp. 56–91. 38 Gottfried Heuer, ‘Jung’s Twin Brother. Otto Gross and Carl Gustav Jung’, in The Journal of Analytical Psychology, vol. 46 no. 4 (October, 2001), p. 678. 39 Otto Gross, ‘Letter to Maximilian Harden’, in Otto Gross: Von geschlechtlicher Not zur sozialen Katastrophe, ed. by Raimund Dehmlow (Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 2000), p. 74. 40 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, p. 55. 41 See n. 18 above: the Otto Gross – Frieda Weekley letters are in Turner et al., pp. 137–227, the Otto Gross – Else Jaffe letters in Whimster with Heuer, pp. 129–60. Another letter from Gross to Else is in Green, The von Richthofen Sisters, pp. 58–9. 42 Gross saw in Else Jaffe’s asceticism, jealousy and denial a symptomatic expression of Heidelberg liberal culture: see Turner et al., p. 175. 43 Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs and Correspondence, ed. by E.W. Tedlock (London: Heinemann, 1961), p. 84. 44 This quotation and the two that follow are from Turner et al., pp. 195–7. 45 Conrad, Lord Jim (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), ch. 20, p. 200. 46 Leonhard Frank, Links wo das Herz ist (1952), trans. by Cyrus Brooks as Heart on the Left (London: Arthur Barker, 1954) p. 13. 47 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, IX 37, p. 64. 48 This is the term which Frieda and Otto had used together to characterise Else: see Turner et al., pp.  166, 175. It may also translate more simply as ‘social culture of ascetism’. 49 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. by Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 95, 109. 50 See Turner et al., pp. 176, 177. For the importance of images of the sun in Germany in these years, see Richard Noll, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Gustav Jung (London: Macmillan, 1997), ch. 6. 51 The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, ed. by Eva Brabant, Ernst Falzeder and Patrizia Giampiere-Deutsch, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), I, p. 142. 52 Stekel, II, pp. 130–1. 53 Quoted in Green, The von Richthofen Sisters, p. 53.

The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross  29 54 Quoted in a letter from Else to Otto, dated 15 December, almost certainly 1907. See Whimster with Heuer, p. 143. 55 See Turner et al., pp. 166, 197 for this ‘erotic community’, also Janet Byrne in A Genius for Living: A Biography of Frieda Lawrence (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), ch. 5. 56 Lawrence, Memoirs, pp. 84, 86, 91. This sense of having outgrown her earlier theoretical self is also a tribute to what she had learned from Lawrence. 57 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. by R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 173. 58 Werfel, Barbara oder die Frömmigkeit (1929); Frank, Heart on the Left, pp. 12–3. 59 Quoted in Ghosts and Other Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964), p. 294, n. 24. 60 Marianne Weber wrote these titles at the bottom of her copy of her husband’s rejection letter of 13 September 1907: see Whimster with Heuer, p. 158, n. 5, where a slightly earlier date is given. 61 Whimster with Heuer, p.  140. The following quotation is from the same letter. 62 Ibid., p. 138. 63 Ibid., p. 141. 64 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), Pt. 3, ‘The Home-Coming’, p. 203. 65 Else to Frieda Gross, 13 June 1909, quoted in Green, Otto Gross, p. 145. 66 Whimster with Heuer, p. 143. 67 Ibid., p.  143. The remainder of this paragraph summarises and cites this letter. 68 For the full text of the letter quoted in this paragraph, see Green, The von Richthofen Sisters, pp. 58–9. 69 Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975) p. 370. Quotations from the Webers in the following paragraph come from pp. 370–5. 70 Conrad, Nostromo, Pt III, ch. 4 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963) p. 303. 71 For the full text of this letter, see Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe, Bd. II/5, p.  402. A translation of an abbreviated version is in Marianne Weber, pp.  375–80, from where the quotations in the next two paragraphs are drawn. 72 See Whimster with Heuer, p. 140, for a typical example of this usage. 73 There is a reference to the question of ‘absolute values’ in one of Gross’s letters to Else: see ibid., p. 138. It thus seems likely the letter dates from the autumn of 1907. 74 Marianne Weber, p. 382. The reference to ‘nerve-ethics’ is on p. 377. 75 Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe, Bd.II/5, p. 462. The following quotations are from p. 463. A translation is in Marianne Weber, p. 381. 76 Whimster with Heuer, p. 145. 77 Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 107 78 Freud to Jung, 19 April 1908, The Freud / Jung Letters, p. 141, from where the quotations in this and the following paragraph come. 79 Hurwitz, p. 157. 80 Aldo Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein between Freud and Jung, trans. by Krishna Winston (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 107.

30  The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross



2

Sons and Lovers Triangles of Antagonism

I ‘Paul Morel’ II (March–July 1911) ‘We talked about Oedipus and understanding leaped through our words’: Lawrence had almost certainly never heard of Freud when that conversation took place. In March 1912, knowledge of Freud’s ideas in England was confined almost entirely to a handful of mainly London-based medical professionals.1 These included members of the Society for Psychical Research of which Freud became a corresponding member in 1911; the sexologist Havelock Ellis; and four pioneering doctors who were drawn to the principles of dynamic psychology and the Freudian analysis of mental illness as the result of internal conflict – doctors who, from 1910 onwards, deliberately set out to popularise Freud’s ideas in medical circles. There was David Forsyth who lectured at the London Polyclinic; Bernard Hart who wrote three essays on Freud in 1909–10 and then, in 1912, The Psychology of Insanity which, according to Malcolm Pines, remained ‘probably the most widely read and influential work’ of its kind for the next 20 years;2 David Eder, of whom more later, but whose The Endowment of Motherhood, published in 1908 by the New Age Press, makes the first mention of Freud I have found outside the medical press; and there was Ernest Jones. Jones had first been introduced to Freud’s ideas around 1906; he had met Jung and Otto Gross in 1907 at the First International Congress of Psychiatry and Neurology in Amsterdam, and the following April at the Congress for Freudian Psychology he met Freud and other leading analysts. He subsequently visited Freud in Vienna and Ferenczi in Budapest before returning to Munich where Gross became his ‘first instructor in the technique of psycho-analysis’, and Frieda Gross his lover and instructor in the powers of the German erotic.3 Though suffering from ‘an unmistakable form of insanity’, as Jones wrote later in casual retrospect, Gross was nevertheless ‘the nearest approach to the romantic ideal of a genius I have ever met’: at a table at the Café Passage, he displayed ‘such penetrative power of divining the inner thoughts of others I was never to see again, not is it a matter that lends itself to description’. Thereafter, from 1908 to 1913, Jones lived in Canada and it was there that he wrote his influential essay ‘The Oedipus-Complex as an

32  Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: A Study in Motive’ (1910). It was an essay that yoked Freud’s ideas to the most iconic piece of English literature, and it proved highly effective in popularising them. The essay eventually found its way to Orage’s The New Age, with which Eder had had a long connection, and was fully discussed there by Alfred E. Randall on 15 February 1912, although with no direct mention of either Oedipus Rex or the Oedipus complex. On 2 May Randall made good his omission with a lengthy sequel presenting Oedipus Rex as ‘the product of an incestuous fantasy’ and Hamlet as the outcome of an oedipal dilemma in Shakespeare.4 It is just possible that Lawrence came across one or both of these articles; but it is unlikely, and he himself would declare in 1913 that, before his introduction to German culture, he had known nothing of Freud. ‘I never did read Freud’, he told his American publisher; ‘but’, he went on, discreetly refraining from mentioning Frieda, ‘I have heard about him since I was in Germany’ (2L 80). With the publication of Randall’s intelligent and provocative essays the Oedipus complex had finally arrived on the English cultural scene. As Dean Rapp confirms, 1912 was the year that ‘the discovery of Freud by the British press began’5 and over the next four years Freudian ideas spread rapidly and excitedly amongst the educated classes. Lawrence, through his meeting with Frieda, was caught up in the forefront of that excitement; in prewar years only May Sinclair amongst literary figures could rival him in her access to psychoanalytic ideas.6 However, if Lawrence knew nothing about Freud when he met Frieda in March 1912, he certainly knew about Sophocles. Exactly one year earlier, on 3 March 1911, he had told his fiancée Louie Burrows: ‘Im doing Oedipus Tyrannus just now – Sophocles. I wish with all my heart I read Greek. These Greek tragedies make one quiet and indifferent. They are very grand, even in translation’ (1L 235). Oedipus, he thought, was ‘the finest drama of all times. It is terrible in its accumulation – like a great big wave coming up – and then crash!’ (1L 261). By 10 March, a mere seven days later, he had returned to the book abandoned shortly before his mother’s death the previous December. ‘I have begun Paul Morel again’, he told Louie. ‘I am afraid it will be a terrible novel. But, if I can keep it to my idea and feeling, it will be a great one’ (1L 237). ‘Terrible’ means more than simply ‘painful’, as Helen Baron glosses it;7 it is a word Lawrence uses regularly in these early letters to denote the true phobos of tragedy. As in The Trespasser, he wanted to enrich his contemporary narrative with a tragic mythos, and he turned now not to Germanic saga but to classical tragedy. He was a man who, whatever he read, was ‘always applying it to himself and his own case’8 and in Oedipus Rex, like Freud before him, he found just such a picture of ‘himself and his own case’. The mythos of the play intensified both the self-analysis and the cultural analysis of his new novel; it depicted the accumulating awareness of incestuous feelings between a mother and her son.

Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism  33 In 1911 Oedipus Rex was more than a literary model for imitation; it was a cause célèbre. Throughout the nineteenth century the play had been banned from public performance because it dealt with incest – a formerly ecclesiastical offence only recently criminalised in 1908 but, as the heavily censored Hansard account of parliamentary discussion shows, still virtually taboo. Like Shelley’s The Cenci, Wilde’s Salome and Ibsen’s Ghosts, all similarly banned, Oedipus Rex had been tainted by the pollution that was its theme. The ban of a play so widely read in public schools, however, was patently absurd, and Oedipus Rex became the stalking-horse for an active campaign against the secret powers of the state censor. The translation that Lawrence would have read – the new translation by Gilbert Murray, just published that February by George Allen & Unwin for two shillings in paperback – had been undertaken as part of that campaign. In response, in 1909, Asquith set up a Joint Select Committee to examine the whole question of censorship; the Committee’s Advisory Board licensed Murray’s translation in particular in order to safeguard the censor’s powers in general, and thus enabled the Reinhardt production at Covent Garden that ran for 25 performances between 15 January and 3 February 1912. Slowly taboos were lifting. ‘Paul Morel’, like The Trespasser, is the work of a writer deliberately aligning himself with the avant-garde of his day in tackling issues both topical and transgressive. Of ‘Paul Morel’ Lawrence fantasised in March 1911 that ‘the British public will stone me if ever it catches sight’ (1L 239). John Worthen thinks Lawrence is imagining his readers’ horror at ‘the complex pain and tragedy of a working-class marriage which had gone wrong’.9 But the fear of lapidation suggests a far deeper offence against the laws of the tribe than that. Lawrence was about to breach the taboos surrounding the cultural fictions of the purity of childhood and family-life; he was about to show, with Murray, that incestuous feelings were not ‘monstrous and inhuman pollutions’ but ‘moral offences capable of being rationally judged’.10 * There were four distinct stages in the composition of ‘Paul Morel’, each producing a different version of the novel.11 Each time Lawrence began again from the beginning, though he abandoned the first two versions before they were finished. The first stage (‘Paul Morel’ I) was probably written in October and November 1910, though nothing of this version survives except a plot outline. ‘Paul Morel’ II was written between March and July 1911, and of this version pp.  72–335 survive almost intact, with 13 more pages that were incorporated into the final Sons and Lovers. This early version has been published in the Cambridge edition of Lawrence’s works under the title of ‘Paul Morel’. ‘Paul Morel’ IIIa was begun on 3 November 1911 but, after writing the first 74 pages,

34  Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism Lawrence collapsed with pneumonia on 19 November, and only took up work again in February 1912; this version was finished about 11 April, some six weeks after meeting Frieda Weekley. ‘Paul Morel’ IIIb was the revision of this version that Lawrence completed in Germany in mid-May and early June 1912 before submitting it to Heinemann, who rejected it in a letter of 1 July. Of this stage perhaps a third survives in fragmentary form, chiefly in isolated pages that Lawrence transferred to his final version. The last stage of composition took place between 7 September and 19 November 1912, when Lawrence rewrote his manuscript yet again; and this version, after being cut by Garnett and revised in proof by Garnett and Lawrence himself, was the version finally published. It was only in mid-October 1912, with three-fifths of the final manuscript written, that Lawrence first used the title Sons and Lovers. These versions of ‘Paul Morel’ belong to a larger history of self-analysis dating back to the autumn of 1909, if not to the beginnings of Lawrence’s writing career with The White Peacock. In the autumn of 1909, however, the need to reach a satisfactory understanding of himself and his family became acute. A Collier’s Friday Night almost certainly dates from then, as does a remarkable sequence of nine poems called ‘A Life History in Harmonies and Discords’. This sequence is shaped by Lawrence’s struggle to reach an integrated understanding of himself; the first eight poems are grouped together in four pairs, each pair consisting of a harmony followed by a discord and each devoted to a crucial stage of the author’s experience – intrauterine life, babyhood, boyhood and adolescence. Together they depict what Blake calls ‘Two Contrary States of the Human Soul’. There are moments when the child experiences ease, innocence and love with its mother, and there are moments of pain, scorn, spite, hatred and anger, felt initially by the mother but woven into the tissue of her foetus and later experienced independently by the child. What is terrible about these states of body and mind is that, to the child, they exist in mutual contradiction. It is the task of maturity, the ninth poem suggests, to integrate them into a single narrative that will do them all justice. It is unclear whether such a synthesis, if successful, would obviate the need for a tenth poem, a final discord, or whether such Blakean oppositions remain a necessary condition of life. This ninth poem, incomplete as it is, is called ‘Last Harmony’:12 Watch each pair of stepping feet trace a strange design With broken curves and faltering lines I trace a pattern, mine or thine Patiently, and over-line Ah the blindly stepping kindly feet Watch them tracing their design The curves waver and meet and intertwine Twisting and Tangling mine and thine

Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism  35 With pain did I carefully overline What part of my graph was plainly plotted Where the curves were knotted I must define Pains that were clotted over mine The problem facing the poet is that of separating out his own narrative from those of other people, specifically from that of the mother. Adult autonomy presupposes an independent narrative but, as the ambiguous intonation in the first stanza makes clear, such a narrative may prove unattainable. The pattern is ‘mine or thine’; but the sense that ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ are mutually exclusive is undermined by an implied shrug of the shoulders which concedes that the distinction between them may be illusory. How can a child separate itself out from a parent when the lines of their lives are so closely plotted together, knotted together, even clotted together, as though the shared wounds of their lives form a single protective scab? These internal rhymes in the last stanza threaten to block the flow of the verse, enacting rhythmically the fixation feared by the writer. His task is still in progress: some of the story is told, where it was plainest, but the harder part remains, to unravel the knots and, if possible, separate the joined tissue. Determinedly, but with ironic self-awareness, the poem pursues its search for a liberating narrative in full knowledge that the narrative, when found, may bear the stigmata of the condition it was designed to heal. The next narrative that Lawrence attempted was the fragment ‘Matilda’, dating from the first half of 1910 and fictionalising the early life of his mother along lines similar to those of Sons and Lovers. He began, that is, with the single thread of his mother’s life; but soon, in October 1910, came ‘Paul Morel’, which from the start confronted the dynamics of family-life and the patterns that ‘waver and meet and intertwine’ within it. Through the fictionalised character of Paul, Lawrence began the long process of separating himself out from the rest of his family, including his mother. Considered autobiographically, the ‘Paul Morel’ writings constitute an ongoing self-analysis that lasted for just over two years, comparable with those of Freud and Jung. ‘His method of arriving at his conclusions’, Helen Baron writes, ‘was to renew his efforts at interpretation with each successive draft’, so that the sequence of drafts reveals ‘the steps by which he made progress in the uncharted territory of psychological self-analysis’.13 It reveals too his growing determination to seek out a fictional form that could avoid the blandishments of romance and intensify the tragic potential of his material, enabling him to explore the painful implications of his own situation as representative of a widespread cultural phenomenon. ‘Paul Morel’ I, to judge by its plot outline, seems to have sidestepped the questions of ‘the unhappy working-class marriage’ and the mother-son relationship altogether;14 it was not until ‘Paul Morel’ II, conceived partly under the influence of Oedipus Rex, that

36  Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism the novel seriously began to grapple with these issues. It is this version of the novel that shows us how far Lawrence had progressed with the fictionalisation of his self-analysis before he met Frieda and first learned of the further ‘strange design’ of the Freudian Oedipus complex. * Lawrence had abandoned ‘Paul Morel’ I by December 1910; and as John Worthen says, a letter written to Rachel Annand Taylor on 3 December 1910 reads like an outline of the new version intended to replace it.15 His mother lay dying in the house as he wrote: Their marriage life has been one carnal, bloody fight. I was born hating my father: as early as ever I can remember, I shivered with horror when he touched me. He was very bad before I was born. This has been a kind of bond between me and my mother. We have loved each other, almost with a husband and wife love, as well as filial and maternal. We knew each other by instinct. She said to my aunt – about me: ‘But it has been different with him. He has seemed to be part of me.’ – and that is the real case. We have been like one, so sensitive to each other that we never needed words. It has been rather terrible, and has made me, in some respects, abnormal. (1L 190) A few days later, on the day before his mother’s funeral, Lawrence told Jessie Chambers: ‘“I’ve loved her like a lover. That’s why I could never love you”’.16 Here the ‘tragedy of a working-class marriage which had gone wrong’ and the tragedy of ‘almost’ incestuous feelings between mother and son are coming together with a terrible clarity quite absent from ‘Paul Morel’ I, where the figure of the mother appears so oddly peripheral. ‘Paul Morel’ II, incomplete and uneven as it is, is the first surviving version of the novel, dating from March to July 1911; and its hero, like its author, hates his father and loves his mother ‘almost with a husband and wife love’. The triangular structure of Sons and Lovers is already present, with the hero gradually coming to recognise the recurrent discords in his failure to harmonise his feelings for his mother and Miriam, for Miriam and Fanny (later to become Clara) and maybe later for Fanny and her husband George (later to become Baxter), just introduced when the manuscript breaks off. Like Oedipus Rex, the novel is seemingly moving towards a moment of anagnorisis when the hero, after long years of self-blindness, discovers that the source of the contamination that has blighted his life and the lives of those around him lies within himself. Lawrence makes his pattern clear when, at a crucial point in the narrative,

Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism  37 he reminds us of the ‘presumption’ of young Paul who, admitting he never wants to grow up, nevertheless boasts to Miriam that he is ‘as wise as most old folks’ (PM 87). This hubris will lead to a nemesis, brought on not by the gods but by the biological laws that drive him inexorably forward into sexual maturity and the self-recognition that this compels. George Hyde calls Sons and Lovers a Kunstlerroman,17 one of those many fin-de-siècle portraits of the artist as a young man which express the alienation of late nineteenth-century writers from bourgeois society. It is a description, however, far truer of ‘Paul Morel’ II than of Sons and Lovers, where the elements of Kunstlerroman are merely vestigial. To judge from Chapter IV, where the young Paul’s thirst for speed causes a comical skating accident, Lawrence seems to be broaching the same theme that he would later explore in The Trespasser, whose hero is driven to overturn the empty forms of bourgeois existence out of hunger for ‘intensity in life’ (T 111). The origins of Paul’s need lie deep in his infancy. He was a ‘sad-looking’ and ‘tormented’ infant (PM 9) who, as soon as he could talk, was ‘endlessly solicitous’ about his mother (PM 13), chattering constantly to her and asking after her health. Such questions about health are really questions about happiness, and Paul’s solicitude for his mother is also solicitude for himself. He feels insecure in her love, and he fears his father; so, by the age of four, alongside occasional rich experiences of ‘the full joy of family life’ (PM 14), he has moments of profound ‘melancholia’ expressed in bouts of motiveless crying (PM 14). In boyhood, visiting the hysterically ill Mrs Staynes, he chats brightly, but underneath lies a ‘sorrow that was half-unconscious, sorrow innate, that he knew nothing about’ (PM 43). Only adolescence will force that sorrow into consciousness. Faced with the depressed woman, Paul tries to cheer her up with the only means at his disposal – words. ‘He told her how beautiful the spring was, describing in a hot, blundering, passionate fashion. He felt grieved and passionate about something, something of which he wanted to convince her’ (PM 43). Paul thinks her different from his own mother, but Lawrence suggests otherwise. Mrs Morel too is a depressed woman whom Paul must cheer up; and this need lies at the root of his hypersensitivity, his melancholia and his art, as he struggles to paint ‘the real living thing through the clothes of the landscape’ (PM 102). He must find liveliness and ‘intensity of life’ in order to ward off the deathliness around him and within him. As he develops from boyhood into adolescence, Paul encounters the challenges of work and sex. He finds a job and enjoys it, not least because it is unambitious work which dampens the demands of his own nature. His fierce chastity similarly neutralises the appeal of the workgirls with whom he chatters so much. It is the confrontation with Miriam that will prove decisive. From the springtime promise when their love blossoms to the bitter autumn of its withering, Paul finds himself for the first time faced with the contradictions of his own nature. Simon

38  Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism Lesser believes there is no evidence in Sons and Lovers that Lawrence ‘recognized the extent to which Paul’s tie to his mother determined his very selection of Miriam’;18 but in ‘Paul Morel’ II it is clear enough. Paul’s fearful avoidance of a country girl just before his adolescent reacquaintance with Miriam reminds us that the ‘pride of power’ (PM 79) he feels with Miriam is because her spirituality disarms his sexuality. He feels potent because absolved of the need to demonstrate potency. The triangular configuration of Paul, the country girl and Miriam reproduces the ‘strange design’ of his life, with body and soul split along the fault-lies of social class to produce psychic impotence. Miriam both provokes and unprovokes him; her likeness to his mother enables him to love her and, at the same time, disables him from consummating that love. It is not a contradiction that Paul can understand; he can only sense, in the language of tragedy, that he has ‘some flaw or other’ in his make-up (PM 108). His dilemma reaches its climax in that great moonlit scene, also found in Sons and Lovers, where desire and inhibition clash in him, leaving him shadowy, disembodied and ironical, like ‘a sort of half-educated angel’ (PM 97). Such marriage of souls as that between Paul and Miriam, Lawrence tells us, is ‘usually tragic’ (PM 97). The same biological maturation that brings him to recognise his impotence with Miriam also sexualises his love for his mother. Already in childhood, his heart had beat quickly at her step on the stair, and he had gathered passionate tributes of plants for her. With the onset of puberty, however, his feelings begin to carry an erotic charge; at 13, he feels the ‘love and intimacy which makes the mere walking down the street together a glorious adventure, an experience’ (PM 63). But such unconsciousness, more characteristic of Paul the painter than of Lawrence the writer, cannot long survive adolescence. Paul may be ‘almost unconscious’ when, with a lover’s loyalty to his mother, he draws away from Miriam as she tries to slip her arm through his (PM 85). He may be only half-aware that, although he cannot kiss Miriam, his kisses for his mother make him feel as if ‘his heart rose and filled him with the strong blood of love’ (PM 82). But such feelings must eventually make themselves known; and a crucial moment in his long journey towards self-knowledge is that terrible scene, adapted from the end of A Collier’s Friday Night and rewritten later for the climax of Chapter VIII of Sons and Lovers, where Paul comes home late at night from Miriam to meet the jealous fury of his mother. This is the scene in which the incestuous overtones in the book are at their most troubling, not least because, replicating the way that the undemonstrative puritanism of the household both masks and enables the troubling emotions beneath, Lawrence’s text works by a concealment that is also a form of revelation. When Lawrence first wrote the scene in A Collier’s Friday Night, the quarrel between mother and son ended with Ernest kissing his mother’s forehead, then her cheek, which he stroked with his fingertips, before a

Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism  39 stage-instruction adds: ‘There is in their tones a dangerous gentleness – so much gentleness that the safe reserve of their souls is broken’ (Plays 59). The danger lies in the fact that the everyday taboos of family-life are breached, the invisible lines safeguarding the self are transgressed and the ordinary categories of language collapse, together with the generational distinctions between familial and sexual love. ‘Husband from husband born and child from child’, says the Messenger in Murray’s Oedipus Rex;19 the blindness that Oedipus inflicts on himself embodies the inner darkness into which he peers when the familiar categories of his life fail. In words from The Trespasser, the house of Ernest’s life begins to ‘leak’ (T 110); and in its positioning as final curtain to Lawrence’s play, the scene derealises all the preceding action, turning it into an empty charade acted out in ignorance of the darker Schopenhauerian powers beneath. Here in ‘Paul Morel’ II the scene is not a final curtain but one step more on Paul’s long road towards recognition of his arrested development. Confronted with his mother’s jealousy, he lacks the independence to tell her to mind her own business. ‘By sympathy of love, it had become to him the most terrible thought in life that his mother should be put aside, in neglect, having no further share in life, she who had been so strong’ (PM 102). His old habit of solicitude undoes him. He cannot bear his mother to suffer, even though the ambiguity of her suffering emerges in her extraordinary appeal: ‘“I’ve never had a husband – not really”’ (PM 103). Abjectly, Paul denies Miriam and relinquishes the interests natural to his youth, before the scene climaxes with the cry which, if the novel had progressed, would surely have begun his anagnorisis: ‘“I shall never love anybody but you”’ (PM 102). There is ‘such a hopelessness  and such genuineness’ in this cry that his mother kisses him fervently and holds him against her bosom, whilst Paul in return kisses her cheek and neck, resting his head on her shoulder in the peace of true love. In a period when Woman was widely seen, in Edward Carpenter’s phrase, as the ‘primitive home and resting-place’ of Man’, 20 Lawrence’s language shows how far Paul’s solicitude has become sexualised. He pressed his face among the pillows in a fury of misery. And yet his heart was glad within him also, and his soul peaceful. Nevertheless, he pressed his face hard among the pillows, like a man who has something hard to bear, which he must never lament. (PM 103) He immediately tries to break with Miriam, saying he cannot love her sexually and then, when he falls ill, luxuriates in his mother’s care like someone ‘utterly in the hands of a lover’ (PM 128). It is now too that, though fearful for himself, he resolves for his mother’s sake to become a good painter – an uneasy decision

40  Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism expressing the novel’s central paradox that what makes him as an artist unmakes him as a man. Throughout the novel we feel the indeterminacies of gender. Caught between his mother’s dominance and his father’s subjection, Paul feels insecure in his masculinity. As a boy he prefers the company of girls, being ‘too self-mistrustful to mix readily with boys’ (PM 19) and, when afraid of the dark, he puts himself to sleep by reciting his favourite poem, ‘Good night and Good morning’, in which a good little girl prepares herself for bed. His best friend is the sporty, vainglorious, outgoing Alec, whose aggressive masculinity attracts him, but Paul himself quite lacks ‘the English fisticuff instinct’ (PM 55). To Lawrence in 1911, such alienation from Edwardian ideas of masculinity was a symptom of decadence. ‘This modern and decadent contempt for action’, he says of Paul, ‘separated him from the mass of boys’ (PM 55). Again like the hero of The Trespasser, Paul prefers to live in his imagination; he is addicted to ‘vivid soulexperience’ that ‘takes the place, with us, of the old adventure, and physical excitement’ (T 111). To describe the making and unmaking of Paul Morel, however, means that a complex judgement must be passed on Mrs Morel, and Lawrence in 1911 was not ready to pass that judgement. In his struggle to translate the austere process of Oedipus’s inexorable enlightenment into the biological imperatives of the modern Bildungsroman, he faltered; he failed to separate ‘mine’ from ‘thine’, to keep to his ‘idea and feeling’. The woman whom Lawrence praises for her ‘honorable self-sacrifice’ (PM  74) cannot be reconciled with the mother who damages her son; and increasingly as the novel progresses, this failure to produce an integrated picture of the mother betrays the symptoms of the condition it describes. Perhaps it was awareness of this contradiction that led Lawrence to abandon the novel where he did, with the father dead from grief after accidentally killing his youngest son, and Paul left to live alone with his mother in line with his deepest fantasies. The novel is toppling into melodrama, the family tragedy turning into family romance. Certainly it is no surprise that Lawrence abandoned it in July 1911. He had not yet found the mythos to help him find the key to his own ambivalence; he had not yet met Frieda or heard of Freud.

II ‘Paul Morel’ IIIa (November 1911–April 1912) In the following November Lawrence began to write ‘Paul Morel’ for the third time; and for the first time he gave Mrs Morel the Christian name of Gertrude. He was enlisting Paul amongst those many late nineteenthcentury descendants of Hamlet whose crippling self-consciousness inhibited their powers of action and troubled their sense of manliness. Like Freud, but independently of him, Lawrence applied Hamlet, alongside Oedipus Rex, to ‘himself and his own case’, discovering himself in its

Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism  41 dramatisation of the love between mother and son, the cultural distance between father and son, and the ‘triangle of antagonism’ (SL 289) between all three. It is difficult to see what is new in ‘Paul Morel’ IIIa since so little of the manuscript survives. The first 85 pages survive complete, although dispersed; and they show, as doubtless ‘Paul Morel’ II had shown, that Paul’s difficulties begin in the womb. Blooded into family-life before birth, at the end of Chapter I the young foetus melts into his mother in ‘the mixing-pot of moonlight’ (PM 196), suggesting the future deathly power of her spiritual consciousness over him. Mrs Morel, though still idealised for her ‘heroism of restraint’ (PM 220), is fanatically moral, and prone to spinning guilty fantasies about her son that exacerbate his future difficulties in achieving autonomy. It is difficult, however, to compare this opening section with its predecessor since the manuscript of ‘Paul Morel’ II only starts at p. 72, leaving little overlap between the two versions. There are a number of other shorter sequences of ‘Paul Morel’ III that survive because they found their way into the finished manuscript. 21 Some of these are survivals from ‘Paul Morel’ II, taken over directly into the third version with little change. 22 Only the sequence describing William’s death and Arthur’s marriage, together with that describing the young love of Paul and Miriam, is certainly new, whilst Paul’s letters to Miriam and the Friday night episode are 1912 revisions of the 1911 version. It is this latter revision I want to discuss here. Apart from his own self-analysis, there were three kinds of pressure shaping Lawrence’s new conception of the novel in autumn 1911, transforming it from the Kunstlerroman it once had been. First, there was pressure from Jessie Chambers, who hoped its composition would cure Lawrence of ‘his strange obsession with his mother’. 23 She urged him to keep the story ‘true to life’ and, in particular, to develop the story of William, whose courtship and marriage had been confined to a single paragraph in ‘Paul Morel’ II. She also urged him to elaborate on the beginnings of Paul’s relationship with Miriam. Lawrence followed her advice, with the result that the slim proportions of ‘Paul Morel’ II began to expand. A new principle of artistic organisation would be needed. Second, there was pressure from the market-place to produce a book that would sell. In autumn 1909 Ford Madox Hueffer instructed Lawrence in the commercial value of ‘workingman novels’ showing how ‘the other ninety-nine hundredths’ live;24 and maybe Garnett did the same in autumn 1911, for it was in a letter to Garnett, dated 6 March 1912, that Lawrence first called ‘Paul Morel’ his ‘colliery novel’ (1L 371). Increasingly throughout ‘Paul Morel’ III and Sons and Lovers, he expanded the working-class elements in the book, including its use of dialect, and foregrounded its topical interest in class differences and antagonisms. One result of this was that Walter Morel became more sympathetically treated, counterbalancing the increasingly critical treatment of his wife.

42  Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism The third influence on ‘Paul Morel’ III is more problematical: that of Frieda Weekley. Critics commonly claim that Frieda influenced Sons and Lovers by introducing Lawrence to Freudian ideas; but how far had Lawrence got with his revision when he met Frieda, probably on 3 March? Had he reached the great oedipal scene in the novel, the Friday night episode, so strikingly different here from its earlier version in ‘Paul Morel’ II? These questions do not admit of certain answers; but a balance of probability may emerge. The scene occupies pp. 272–81 of the ‘Paul Morel’ III manuscript, and survives intact because it was incorporated virtually unchanged into the finished Sons and Lovers. There are various kinds of evidence relating to the state of Lawrence’s progress with ‘Paul Morel’ III on 3 March: evidence from general chronology, evidence from the paper used and evidence from the contents. First, the chronology. When Lawrence returned to his manuscript in February 1912 after recovering from pneumonia, he began at p. 75. The earliest he could have begun was 10 February, the day after his return to Eastwood; and by 23 February it was going ‘pretty well’ (1L 367). Jessie Chambers thought it took him ‘about six weeks’ to complete, and that it was certainly finished by 25 March. 25 The completed manuscript was around 450 pages long, and if we assume completion by 22 March, Lawrence must have written around 375 pages in 42 days, or on average 9 pages a day. On the basis of these figures, Lawrence had reached p. 270 on the morning of 3 March. He was, in other words, on the very point of rewriting the Friday night episode (pp. 272–81) when he met Frieda. In a different calculation, based on the assumption that Lawrence had 44 days free in the spring of 1912 to work on the novel, and that he wrote at the rate of 8–9 pages a day, he would have reached p. 255 by 3 March. 26 Both sets of figures are provisional, and different methods of computation yield different results; but both suggest that Lawrence rewrote the episode immediately after meeting Frieda. We know from the study of paper-types undertaken by Helen Baron that the Friday night episode was written on what she calls j paper and that, following his habit of using the same pad for correspondence, Lawrence also wrote letters on j paper on 1 and 4 March. His next letters, dated 6 and 8 March, use k paper, as does the next episode of the novel to survive, describing Paul’s letters to Miriam and Arthur’s marriage (pp. 309–18). The episode of Clara’s appointment at Jordan’s (pp. 328–31), ­ which also survives, was written on l paper, which may have been used for letters as late as 27 March. The rapidity of this transition to l paper suggests that k paper had already been in use for some time before p.  309. These facts suggest the following narrative. After lunching with Frieda on 3 March, Lawrence went to visit the Daxes at Shirebrook, where he stayed until 8 March. He took the pads of j and k paper with him, both currently in use, to continue working on his

Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism  43 novel, which stood at somewhere near p. 270. The j paper was almost exhausted, but between 4 and 6 March Lawrence used it to write passages which included the Friday night episode, before returning to the k paper which he had exhausted by p. 328. There are three aspects to Lawrence’s revision of the contents of this episode. First, what had been a scene between mother and son in ‘Paul Morel’ II is recast as family drama; Lawrence reworks the last act of A Collier’s Friday Night, with significant alterations, to show the dysfunctional behaviour of the family as a whole. When Paul arrives home, his sister Annie, no longer the gossipy gadabout of the play, sides selfrighteously with Mrs Morel, indignant at his late return because her mother is ill. Whilst in A Collier’s Friday Night it was intimated that the mother had a weak heart, in the corresponding scene in ‘Paul Morel’ II there was no trace of her illness, and nowhere a sense of her impending death. The introduction of her illness here is new, and its prefigurement of old age and death intensifies the confrontation between mother and son that follows Annie’s retirement to bed. Whereas in the earlier version Paul had been anxious from the start to avoid hurting his mother, here he begins in hectoring self-defence, but quickly collapses when faced with her suffering, her illness and her jealousy of the youthful Miriam. Lawrence’s revisions point up the brittleness of Paul’s attempted maturity, and highlight the grotesque disparity of age that characterises the transgressiveness of their love. The most striking transformation of the episode, however, concerns the father. In ‘Paul Morel’ II Walter Morel came home early from the pub and was already in bed when Paul arrived; he did not figure in the scene at all. But in ‘Paul Morel’ III he comes home late to catch Paul and his mother embracing in the kitchen, and his reaction has a Shakespearean richness about it. ‘“At your mischief again?”’ he sneers (278). A violent quarrel develops between all three which only ends when Mrs Morel is about to faint. Again Lawrence has drawn on A Collier’s Friday Night where the father also came home late and, resenting his exclusion from the family, quarrelled drunkenly with his wife before threatening to fight his son. The quarrel there too was in the kitchen over the apportionment of food, symbolic of maternal provision and love. But there are two differences in ‘Paul Morel’ III. First, whilst in A Collier’s Friday Night the father enters in the middle of Act III, leaving the confrontation between mother and son as the dramatic climax of the play, the entrance here takes place towards the end of the chapter and is itself the climax. Second, Ernest, the son in the play, though angry, lashes his father only with his tongue, whilst Paul in the novel is ready to fight. ‘He ached for that stroke’, Lawrence wrote, before adding (and later excising) ‘as a lover aches madly for his mistress’ (303). The effect of both changes is to highlight the rivalry between father and son over the mother. There is no comparable scene in ‘Paul Morel’ II; the sons defend their mother against

44  Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism their father, whose brutality they hate, but they are not his rivals. It is tempting to say that Lawrence made these changes because he had come to appreciate the insight embodied in the Oedipus complex: namely, it is a complex, a constellation of emotions in which love for the mother and hate for the father are two sides of the same coin. The second kind of revision that Lawrence made to this scene is more easily described. In recasting the scene as family drama, he also increased the sexual suggestiveness of the exchanges between Paul and his mother. In ‘Paul Morel’ II, after his mother had kissed him, Paul responded by putting his arms around her, pressing her close, kissing her cheek and neck, and laying his head on her shoulder as if in search of rest. In ‘Paul Morel’ III, however, where his mother’s pain and possessiveness are intensified, her kiss is ‘fervent’, her voice trembles with ‘passionate love’ (301) and Paul’s reaction is correspondingly more sexualised: ‘He stroked his mother’s hair, and his mouth was on her throat’. Later, Lawrence adds: ‘Without knowing, he gently stroked her face, as, afterwards, he did to other women, his lovers’ (300–1). These last nine words were taken out at proof stage, perhaps because they distract attention but surely also because they are too obvious in their incestuous implication. Similarly, the guilty ‘fear’ that Mrs Morel feels at her husband’s arrival and the ‘strange’ expression on her face that makes Paul tremble are both consistent with an exciting new awareness of Freudian oedipal theory. The third revision that Lawrence made is his new allusion to Hamlet at the chapter’s end. After the violent emotion of the play-scene, Hamlet urged his own claim over Gertrude and begged her not to sleep with Claudius: ‘Good night. But go not to my uncle’s bed’ (III. 4. 161). In ‘Paul Morel’ III, after the violence of the quarrel, when the drunken Walter Morel has gone to bed and his wife is preparing to follow him, Paul pleads: ‘“Sleep with Annie, mother, not with him […] Don’t sleep with him, mother”’ (304). As we have seen, Hamlet was already in Lawrence’s mind before he met Frieda; but in her he met someone who knew Hamlet differently from himself.27 She would have known of Freud’s comparison of the play with Oedipus Rex and, in any discussion of Oedipus, would have mentioned Hamlet too. The link between the two plays, now a commonplace, had first been established by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams; nineteenth-century critics had coupled Hamlet with Orestes, not Oedipus. Freud’s connexion, however, facilitated new insight into both the sexuality of Hamlet’s love for his mother and his impotency before Claudius. Lawrence captures something of both feelings when, at the chapter’s end, Paul kisses his mother ‘close’ before she retires to her husband’s bed, leaving him to press his face into his pillow ‘in a fury of misery’ (304). Paul’s rivalry with his father, taken together with the allusion to Hamlet, gives these words a richer sexual content than they possessed in ‘Paul Morel’ II.

Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism  45 These textual considerations, together with evidence from general chronology and the paper used, suggest on balance that Lawrence rewrote the Friday night scene after meeting Frieda and partly under her influence. His revisions, it is true, were in line with earlier drafts – he had created family drama in A Collier’s Friday Night; he had probed the intimacies of the mother-son relationship in ‘Paul Morel’ II; and he had invoked Hamlet at the start of ‘Paul Morel’ III in November 1911. Nevertheless, the sexual triangulation of family dynamics in ‘Paul Morel’ III shows a remarkable conformity between Lawrence’s thinking and Freud’s; and whatever Frieda’s influence on ‘Paul Morel’ III, this conformity would facilitate her influence on the novel’s development during its fourth and final stage of revision in the autumn of 1912. At this stage her influence would be unquestionable. For the Paul Morel material was changing in form and focus; the Kunstlerroman was turning into the family and cultural history signalled by its eventual title Sons and Lovers.

III ‘The Married Man’ (April 1912) The talk between Lawrence and Frieda about Oedipus was no mere literary chat, designed to help a young author organise his autobiographical text; it was a discussion charged with sexual desire. The past oedipal dynamic was actively present, as this single young man who thought himself, ‘in some respects, abnormal’ fell in love with the professor’s wife whom Gross had seen as a ‘motherly woman’ (mütterliches Weib), possessed of a sexuality rich in therapeutic power. Frieda was different from any woman Lawrence had met, and different from him.28 Warm and spontaneous where he was puritanical and constrained, she subscribed to a sexual ethic that far outstripped the bohemian improprieties of Lawrence’s own Nottinghamshire circle. The adultery that Lawrence had just depicted in The Trespasser of January–February 1912 must have seemed small beer to her beside the principled transgressions of Gross and Ernst Frick. She constituted a wholly new challenge to Lawrence’s view of himself and to the range of his artistic expression. She flourished beyond the constraints of the tragic novel. If Frieda declared herself ‘amazed’ at Lawrence, he must have been even more amazed at her; but there was another side to him too – ‘the hard, cruel if need be, me that is the writer’ (1L 214) – that was watching her critically, as she had watched him. What kind of a bird was this? Almost immediately he found the opportunity, and the literary form, to meet the challenge. From 25 to 31 March, he accepted an urgent invitation to visit his old friend George Neville, a ‘Don Juanish fellow’ (1L 373), who had secretly got married after making a girl-friend pregnant and was now of necessity living ‘en bachelier’ (1L 379), apart from wife and child. It was ‘quite a story’, Lawrence added – such a story that he

46  Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism turned it into a play, ‘The Married Man’ in which, as Carl Baron says, he set out ‘some of the main elements of his current life for provisional analysis’. 29 The dramatic form enabled him to display long-familiar patterns of provincial flirtation and courtship, to explore their inherent conflict between sexual desire and conventional restraint and to isolate the difficulties in handling that conflict honestly and honourably. More particularly, it enabled him to examine his own sexual behaviour and beliefs beside those of Frieda Weekley. Improbable as it seems, Lawrence set out to dramatise the ‘new ethic’ of Otto Gross in a comedy designed for the English stage. It would be the first of his many attempts to take the measure of Frieda and her world. The play belongs, as Susan Carlson Galenbeck shows,30 to a tradition of witty comedy going back to Congreve and Shakespeare; it follows the fortunes of two would-be men about town, aided by a naïve local gentleman farmer, as they flirt with three orphaned sisters and the farmer’s sister in a country village where they are staying. One of the young men, George Grainger, a doctor, is based on Neville, the other, Billy Brentnall, on Lawrence himself, and the play focusses on the contrast between them. Grainger, like Neville, is married with a young baby but wants to keep it quiet, whilst Brentnall insists that the truth be told. In Act I the three young men plan their evening’s gallivanting. In Act II, they meet the women. In Act III, there is a party at the farmer’s house and, in a sudden coup de théâtre amidst all the excitement of dancing, Brentnall is surprised by the entrance of his own fiancée, Elsa Smith. In Act IV comes the final reckoning, with the arrival of Grainger’s wife, Ethel, and her baby. ‘Life is awfully fast down here’, Lawrence told Garnett, relishing the ‘howling good fun’ of a Nottinghamshire dance (1L 369); and it was the ambiguity, instability and danger of such ‘fun’ that would form the subject-matter of his play. Georg Simmel has celebrated the ‘simultaneity of implicit consent and refusal’31 inherent in flirtation, where promise and prevarication keep the serious business of commitment in a state of pleasurable suspense; like the playfulness of art, he thought, flirtation offers civilised consolation for the loneliness of human life. In the Schopenhauerian climate of Georgian Britain, flirtation enjoyed metaphysical status as the site of conflict between the unconscious sources of human vitality and the conscious illusions of civilised life. Shaw dramatised the Schopenhauerian ‘Life Force’ in Man and Superman, which Lawrence and Frieda saw together in March 1912; and it is to this power that George Grainger pays tribute in Act II of ‘The Married Man’ when he says flirtatiously to Annie, the eldest of the three sisters: ‘I know you like “life” better than “goodness”’ (Plays 198). Here is the dialectical heart of Lawrence’s play. Man and Superman seeks a synthesis between the ‘hell’ of hedonism and the ‘heaven’ of Christian virtue by reliance on the ‘creative-evolutionist’ Life Force;32 ‘The Married Man’ seeks a synthesis between ‘life’ and ‘goodness’ by establishing a new honesty about desire.

Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism  47 Grainger’s role is to epitomise the typical married man of modern bourgeois life. The play begins with an echo of Man and Superman: ‘Where do you think of going on Saturday?’ asks Brentnall. ‘Hell’, Grainger replies (Plays 193); and the language of guilty damnation begins to gather around him. His rebellion against goodness in the name of life may express the ‘manliness’ of his nature, which women find attractive (Plays 224), and yet he can conceive of nothing other than the furtive adultery of an affair. All his natural charm, his sexual playfulness and his ‘virtues of goodnature’ are compromised by what Brentnall calls ‘funk’ (Plays 225). Lacking the ruthlessness to be a rake and the integrity to tell the truth, he slips into an irresponsible hedonism harmful to everyone. Trapped between his wife’s demand for fidelity and his own desire for pleasure, he equivocates; and such, says Lawrence, in our current state of gender relations, is the married man of today. * There are two attempts in the play to find a sexual ethic to reconcile ‘goodness’ and ‘life’, both advocating free love. The first is Brentnall’s in Act II, as he acknowledges the sexual frustration and fear of spinsterhood driving Annie towards Grainger: ‘Know men, and have men, if you must. But keep your soul virgin, wait and believe in the good man you may never have’ (Plays 206). Brentnall is advising Annie to take a lover on hygienic grounds, but not to deceive herself that second-best is best. Annie’s response is cut short by moral distaste: ‘It is not very – ’ (Plays 206). She’s right; it isn’t. Brentnall’s belief that ‘we’re made so that either we must have love, or starve and go slightly mad’ (Plays 205) was fashionable in radical circles around the turn of the century; Olive Schreiner’s doctor, for instance, told her ‘sexual inactivity was injurious to health – particularly mental health’.33 Lawrence told Frieda that he himself, before meeting her, had many a time taken a woman as one takes ‘a dose of morphia’ (1L 404); and yet the play is clear that such a ‘nerve-ethic’ (in the Webers’ contemptuous phrase), however honestly enacted, is ugly and disintegrative in its separation of soul from body and love from sex. Elsa Smith, however, brings with her a rather different sexual ethic that seems at first sight able to transcend the contradiction inhabited by Grainger; and as Brenda Maddox says, it is an ethic grounded in ‘the free-love gospel according to Otto Gross’.34 Through the warmth and ladylike power of her stage-presence in Act III and her conversation in Act IV, she is able ‘to liberate the participants from false constraints’, 35 soothe their distress and partially resolve the dramatic intrigue of the play. It is a triumph of personality as much as of belief; there is something of the same goldenes Kind about Elsa Smith that Gross had seen five years earlier in Frieda Weekley.

48  Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism Elsa’s unexpected arrival in Act III brings a new sobriety to a party whose drinking, dancing and flirting have all got out of hand; and despite his boasted honesty, it is Brentnall who is most abashed by her entrance. His guilt underscores the inherent dishonesty of flirtation. Elsa scorns to flirt, and her attitude has powerful antecedents. Freud disdained flirtation, 36 and Gross would have denounced it politically as a neurotic temporising with desire, a demeaning sexual accommodationism. Its preoccupation with what might be evades the impoverished narratives of what actually is. In Gross’s view, all forms of sublimation were abhorrent, and Frieda Weekley too seems to have believed that ‘sex is sex, and ought to find its expression in the proper way’ (MN 127). Something of this revolutionary puritanism inspires Elsa in ‘The Married Man’; and when she joins the dance, it is with a warmth and openness far removed from the tantalising blend of promise and prevarication on which flirtation depends. At the play’s climax in Act IV, when Grainger’s wife and girl-friends confront him in his bedroom, Elsa states her ethic clearly: ‘I think Satan is in hard judgment, even more than in sin’ (Plays 234). Sexual responsiveness is natural; what is damaging is to deny one’s own feelings and to denounce those of others. It is natural to respond to an attractive member of the opposite sex, but there must be no deception: I think a man ought to be fair. He ought to offer his love for just what it is – the love of a man married to another woman – and so on. And, if there is any strain, he ought to tell his wife “I love this other woman”. (Plays 232–3) Despite her sweet reasonableness, the implications of Elsa’s statement are remarkable. ‘I think’, she says, ‘with a little love, we can help each other so much’ (Plays 233). Elsa’s view echoes both that of Frieda Weekley, who believed that with free love ‘the world would straightaway turn into a paradise’, and that of Otto Gross, who looked forward to the Promised Land of the future as a place where the contradictions between Christian virtue and pleasure could finally be reconciled.37 Following Gross still, Elsa insists that men and women have equal rights in sex; the freemasonry of patriarchy must yield. Like some latterday Millamant, she draws up the provisos on which her forthcoming marriage to Brentnall must rest: ‘Promise me you won’t have one philosophy when you are with men, in your smoke room, and another when you are with me, in the drawing room’ (Plays 232). She herself will act with the freedom of her own desires; she has been driven over by her friend Will Hobson (a covert allusion to Frieda’s real-life lover, Will Dowson) and, despite Brentnall’s objection, she defiantly asserts her right to do as she likes. The full implication of her philosophy is not lost

Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism  49 on the other people present: it’s ‘worse than Mormons’, says one (Plays 233). Yet, says Brentnall, it is better than ‘subterfuge, bestiality, or starvation and sterility’ (Plays 233). Susan Carlson Galenbeck calls Elsa ‘Lawrence’s mouthpiece’ in Act IV,38 but Elsa does not have the last word in the play. John Worthen finds her Nietzschean Ja-Sagen ‘a little naïve’, and Sylvia Sklar deprecates her patronising ‘glibness’.39 In four ways Elsa simplifies the situation before her. First, with the insouciance of a lady, she ignores the question of money which preoccupies the other characters. Second, her reaction to Ethel’s baby is merely sentimental. Third, whilst claiming sexual freedom for herself, she watches jealously over her own fiancé. Fourth, ignoring the complexity of her own feelings, she blithely disregards it in others. Ethel’s possessiveness and Grainger’s bitterness at being trapped are the poles on which their marriage turns. Love is vitiated by sentimentality and anger by resentment, and both partners are well-versed in their lines. Ethel plays the neglected, cajoling wife, Grainger the sour, remorseful husband, and each is part perfect. It is all very well for Elsa to say to Brentnall: ‘I want the real you, not your fiction’ (Plays 232). But in her desire for the real, she disregards the negative in people. She wants love and sexuality to be simple but, as Gilbert says later in Mr Noon, ‘“Perhaps it isn’t natural to be simple”’ (MN 129): financial difficulties, parental responsibilities and emotional complexities are not to be wished away. Lawrence, who had known Nietzsche ‘from at least early 1910’,40 was clear that any hope for an immediate transvaluation of sexual morality was theoretical and naïve. The play attempts a balanced judgement, however. Elsa’s new ethic is attractive beside the resentfulness of the Graingers’ marriage, her hostility to fiction in relationships is appealing and the sunny warmth of her personality highlights Brentnall’s immaturity and volatility. But her strengths have weaknesses which Brentnall’s presence clarifies. His awareness of the difficulties of human sexuality makes Elsa seem naïve, even narcissistic, whilst his intelligence makes her warmth seem sentimental; and his delight in the fictional roles that Grainger and Ethel play suggests a dramatist’s appreciation of the role of the fictive in human life. But the play is sympathetic to the attempts of Elsa and Brentnall at making a new kind of marriage, at ‘making history’ (1L 390). Certainly the old kind of marriage, as lived by Grainger and Ethel, seems destined for tragedy. Conceived in the shadow of an illegitimate pregnancy, constrained by poverty and characterised by the man’s guilty self-pity and the woman’s tearful reproachfulness, it is a charade upon which Brentnall mockingly pronounces the play’s last word: ‘That’s the way, George’, he says (Plays 235), as Grainger is left holding the baby. It is against this background of failure that Elsa and Brentnall try to find another way, through free love between partners who are open and equal with one another. In real life, of course, Frieda Weekley, whatever her ideals, had not practised such openness. Her sexual adventures had been undertaken

50  Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism in a secrecy which she now intended to enjoin on Lawrence, and maybe ‘The Married Man’ carries a message for her in this. What Elsa and Brentnall seek to avoid in married life is the psychological splitting caused by dishonesty and repression. Brentnall says this directly in Act II when he urges Annie to greater sexual freedom: ‘Don’t cause a split between your conscious self and your unconscious – that is insanity’ (Plays 205). The belief that certain kinds of mental illness involved dissociation, or splitting (Spaltung), was widespread at the time; double and multiple personalities had been widely studied in the nineteenth century and, after 1850, enjoyed a literary vogue epitomised in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.41 What Freud brought to the familiar psychiatric casematerial of dissociation, as Bernard Hart declared in The Psychology of Insanity (1912),42 was the discovery of its dynamic cause in repression. Brentnall’s words suggest a new awareness in Lawrence of Freud, of the split caused by repression of unconscious bodily desires by the conscious mind in response to the constraints of civilised morality. This use of the word split was new to Lawrence’s writing in March 1912, although he would immediately use it again with reference to Sons and Lovers. It formed part of the new psychological and ethical language he developed after meeting Frieda, and its role was to chart the damage caused by the repression of desire. At the final curtain Grainger and his wife, ‘life’ repressed by ‘goodness’, seem about to succumb to the banal tragedy of bourgeois marriage. Elsa and Brentnall, despite their differences, hope to find a new synthesis that will surpass it; and maybe too, the deferrals involved in flirtation will continue to help Brentnall negotiate what Grainger cannot – the conflict between the infinities of desire and the limitations of reality. It may also be that if, as Georg Simmel believed, the playfulness of art achieves the same end as flirtation,43 Lawrence too, in turning from tragedy to comedy, had found a way to make his own art mediate between desire and reality, between the paradisal aspirations of Elsa and the pragmatic awareness of Brentnall. In K.R. Eissler’s language, ‘being an artist reduced the potential for acting out’.44 The comedy of the play, like the flirtation which is its theme, preserves the hope, creativity and liveliness originating in the tissues of the body, whilst avoiding the naïve destructive subordination of life to theory epitomised in the erotic programme of Frieda Weekley. It is an act of successful sublimation such as Gross and Frieda might have scorned, and with its help Lawrence began his long reckoning both with the woman he loved and with the ‘new ethic’ of Otto Gross.

IV Sons and Lovers (September–November 1912) The Married Man was completed by 23 April and on 3 May Lawrence left with Frieda for Germany where, amidst the struggle to secure their

Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism  51 relationship, he returned to his novel and produced the revised version now known as ‘Paul Morel’ IIIb. This was finished by 9 June and posted to Heinemann in hope of immediate publication. Only 22 pages survive of the changes introduced at this stage. Those from the first part of the novel show Lawrence’s continuing efforts to work up the book as a ‘colliery novel’. Later passages deal with Miriam and Paul, and, though the original pages from IIIa are lost, it is likely they showed intensified criticism of Miriam. ‘I’m sorry it turned out as it has’, Lawrence told Jessie Chambers in mid-May. ‘You’ll have to go on forgiving me’ (1L 408). There are three passages involved, (pp. 397–9, 402–6 and 414–17 in the facsimile edition), all sexually explicit and all, as Helen Baron says, revealing ‘Lawrence’s reflections on his relationship with Jessie under the impact of his very new relationship with Frieda’.45 More precisely, they emphasise the split in Paul between the liveliness of his maturing sexuality and the impotence that inhibits it – an impotence that Miriam blames on his relationship with his mother. Such direct statement proved too explicit for Lawrence and he dropped it from his text;46 but the passage shows he had grasped it. Miriam in her turn can only respond to Paul’s desire with that self-sacrifice of which the novel is becoming increasingly critical; and when finally he leaves her, she retaliates by treating him as a mother would treat a wayward child. It is a defensive response deep in her culture, but Paul is determined: ‘“I don’t want another mother”’, he says to himself (SL 340). Despite Lawrence’s revisions, Heinemann rejected the book, saying it lacked unity and reticence, its characters were unsympathetic and the degradation of the once genteel Mrs Morel was ‘almost inconceivable’ (1L 421n). His judgement was based in part on the verdict of his reader, Walter de la Mare, who found the book diffuse: ‘the real theme of the story is not arrived at till half way through’, he grumbled (1L 424n). Garnett, who offered to read the book for Duckworth, also found it diffuse; on reflection Lawrence himself, though furious at being rejected, found the first part ‘too long’ and promised to ‘squash’ it together (1L 423). In fact the revision of September–November 1912 was far more comprehensive than this suggests. Of the 525 pages in the final manuscript, 436 were rewritten; with gathering self-knowledge and increasingly confident purpose, Lawrence welcomed the chance to work over his book again. His new relationship with Frieda was bearing fruit. The learning, however, combative as it often was, was not all one way. Frieda too had much to assimilate, not least from Lawrence’s criticism of her sexual ethic. Gross was much in the air, discussed no doubt with Else and her husband too, both highly educated and psychoanalytically informed.47 In April Lawrence told Garnett, in language recalling Gross, that Weekley loved Frieda ‘in a jealous monogamistic fashion’ (1L 388), but that he himself was determined she ‘must live largely and abundantly’ (1L 392). In June Frieda sent some of Gross’s letters to her

52  Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism husband to explain her decision to stay with Lawrence. In response Weekley attributed her desertion of him entirely to the German who had ‘put these “ideas” into her head’ (1L 424), and told her she must ‘renounce for ever all her ideas of love’ (1L 420). After her discussions with Lawrence, curiously, this was the conclusion that Frieda herself reached. She told Garnett in August that she didn’t ‘prance theories or anything else of the sort any longer’ (1L 439), and by December she had come to see the theory of free love as a way of dodging commitment. ‘My theories have sadly altered, there are 2 sides to human love, one that wants to be faithful, the other wants to run, my running one was uppermost, but it’s going to be faithful now’ (1L 498). Characteristically, between these two letters she had slept with Harold Hobson in an Alpine hay-hut, enacting her belief that the therapeutic power of her love could help men in sexual difficulties. ‘She’s naturally vain’, Lawrence commented (1L 439). He was beginning to see more deeply into the narcissism implicit in Elsa Smith, and explicit in the heroine of The Fight for Barbara, the play he wrote between 28 and 30 October whilst working on ‘Paul Morel’. ‘“You love only yourself”’, Wesson tells Barbara (Plays 269). Frieda too, Lawrence was saying, was in love with herself, with an image of herself, and was ‘running’ from real relationship. She resisted Lawrence when he asserted his masculine authority, or urged marriage upon her; but what he said about commitment touched a chord. Despite ongoing gestures of sexual independence, Frieda – or part of her – was beginning to see her earlier erotic creed as Stekel would later see that of Gross: as ‘a flight from love, an evasion of every genuine feeling and every true sexual impulse’.48 She was learning, she said, ‘the feel and the understanding of things and people, that is morality, I think’ (1L 439). At the same time she was struggling with Lawrence over ‘Paul Morel’, helping him, she told Garnett, fully to realise its oedipal theme: I think L. quite missed the point in ‘Paul Morel’. He really loved his mother more than any body, even with his other women, real love, sort of Oedipus, his mother must have been adorable – he is writing P.M. again, reads bits to me and we fight like blazes over it, he is so often beside the point ‘but “I’ll learn him to be a toad” as the boy said as he stamped on the toad’. (1L 449) It is a remarkable claim that Lawrence had ‘quite missed the point’ in ‘Paul Morel’. Doubtless there is vaingloriousness here, as Frieda played up her own contribution to the process of revision; but clearly she felt that Lawrence needed the focus of Freudian theory to do full justice to his theme, to find the general pattern in the individual tragedy. At times the tragic ‘“house of Atreus” feeling’ of the book exasperated Frieda, and one day she wrote a skit called ‘Paul Morel, or His Mother’s Darling’.49

Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism  53 Her help with the novel was part of her redemptive plan to liberate its author, and she was furious that her cure was failing. In words that drily echo the judgement of Else and her circle on the fanatismus of Otto Gross, Lawrence mocked her missionary zeal: ‘I’ve got a heap of warmth and blood and tissue into that fuliginous novel of mine – F. says it’s her – it would be. She saves me, but can’t save herself. That’s how all these Messiany people are’ (1L 462). Yet all the while under her influence the mythos of the novel was being transformed from Oedipus Rex to the Oedipus complex. The most obvious signs of the changes made to the novel in autumn 1912 are its new title Sons and Lovers and its extended treatment of William’s short life, which intensifies the family theme whilst offering a type of its general relevance. We can sense the pressure of Frieda’s input in all this from the words Lawrence gives to Johanna in Mr Noon: ‘“There isn’t a man worth having, nowadays, who can get away from his mother. Their mothers are all in love with them, and they’re all in love with their mothers, and what are we poor women to do?”’ They’re mother’s darlings, she adds, ‘“all Hamlets, obsessed by their mothers”’ (MN 124). William too had been ‘a lover’ to Mrs Morel (SL 44). The pathology was widespread, and by late 1912 Paul Morel agreed. ‘He was like so many young men of his own age’, for whom ‘desire was a sort of detached thing, that did not belong to a woman. He loved Miriam with his soul’ (SL 319). When the novel was finally finished, Lawrence and Frieda wrote a joint letter to Garnett on 19 November that suggests the full extent of its revision. As Jeffrey Berman has said, ‘the first psychoanalytic criticism of Sons and Lovers was written by Lawrence himself’.50 It follows this idea: a woman of character and refinement goes into the lower class, and has no satisfaction in her own life. She has had a passion for her husband, so the children are born of passion, and have heaps of vitality. But as her sons grow up she selects them as lovers – first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother – urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they can’t love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives, and holds them. – It’s rather like Goethe and his mother and Frau von Stein and Christiana – . As soon as the young men come into contact with women, there’s a split. William gives his sex to a fribble, and his mother holds his soul. But the split kills him, because he doesn’t know where he is. The next son gets a woman who fights for his soul – fights his mother. The son loves the mother – all the sons hate and are jealous of the father. The battle goes on between the mother and the girl, with the son as object. The mother gradually proves the stronger, because of the tie of blood. The son decides to leave his soul in his mother’s hands, and, like his elder brother, go for passion. He gets passion.

54  Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism Then  the split begins to tell again. But, almost unconsciously, the mother realises what is the matter, and begins to die. The son casts off his mistress, attends to his mother dying. He is left in the end naked of everything, with the drift towards death. (1L 476–7) Lawrence’s account shows how completely, with Frieda’s help, he had transformed his Kunstlerroman into what might described as the first Freudian novel in English, locating ‘psychical impotence’ in the split between body and soul, where the incestuous components of the soul’s attachments are repressed. There is no need to repeat here, any more fully that Lawrence has done in his letter, the oedipal mythos that has been so often identified in Sons and Lovers. The ‘triangle of antagonism’ that is the template for the ‘formal symmetries’51 of the book provides a geometry of frustration as unremittingly tragic as that in Jude the Obscure. Lawrence made no secret of his literary models or his ambition to match them. In the ‘Foreword’ of January 1913 he wrote: ‘The old son-lover was Oedipus. The name of the new one is legion’ (SL 473); and the following May, disappointed with sales, he told Garnett: ‘if Hamlet and Oedipus were published now, they wouldn’t sell more than 100 copies, unless they were pushed’ (1L 546). But all that was about to change. In 1912, as Dean Rapp has shown, ‘the discovery of Freud by the British press began’ and, unknown to Lawrence, a new class of reader began to emerge. Ivy Low, for example, sent enthusiastic postcards to her friends about the novel in 1913, amazed to find her own interest in Freud reflected back at her: ‘This is a book about the Oedipus Complex!’ she exclaimed.52 In breaching the taboo that surrounded incest, Sons and Lovers lay at the growing tip of its civilisation; and if Frieda and Lawrence were its first Freudian readers, many others would soon follow. * Lawrence’s summary of Sons and Lovers for Garnett seems cool and objective, that of a writer who has mastered his material; yet it was a success, he said, earned ‘out of sweat as well as blood’ (1L 476). ‘When he wrote his mother’s death’, Frieda recalled, ‘he was ill and his grief made me ill too’.53 His struggle to face his trauma is shown, according to John Worthen, in the ‘clumsy scrawl’ of his handwriting across the page,54 and it inspired his statement to Arthur McLeod on 26 October 1913 that ‘one sheds ones sicknesses in books – repeats and presents again ones emotions, to be master of them’ (2L 90). Both images – of a cathartic process that sheds sicknesses as a tree sheds leaves, and one that masters them by recollection – declare Lawrence’s belief that, in writing Sons and Lovers, he had put his past behind him. In Freudian terms, he was

Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism  55 claiming that the composition of Sons and Lovers had proved a successful self-analysis. It was a claim that would return to haunt him later, and it has haunted criticism of the book ever since. Alfred Kuttner was the first critic publicly to discuss the book as self-analysis in a long intelligent essay in the Psychoanalytic Review for July 1916, treating the novel in its cultural context as ‘a priceless commentary’ on the love-life of its day: In every epoch the soul of the artist is sick with the problems of his generation. He cures himself by expression in his art. And by producing a catharsis in the spectator through the enjoyment of his art he also heals his fellow beings.55 Lawrence was angry at the review: ‘My poor book: it was, as art, a fairly complete truth: so they carve a half lie out of it, and say “Voilà!” Swine!’ (2L 655). He had defended the book to Arthur McLeod as self-analysis; now he defends it as art – and here is a problem that continues to bedevil the book. Is it to be read as self-analysis or art? Is the treatment of Morel, for instance, artistically successful or unsuccessful, and if unsuccessful, is that because we are using criteria that belong to psychoanalysis and biography rather than to art? The question is more difficult than it seems. A handful of later critics, like Graham Hough, have found no problem: the book succeeded on both counts, and provided Lawrence with the ‘catharsis’ that was ‘a necessary preliminary to all the later work’.56 Others are doubtful and attribute the course of Lawrence’s future development as man and writer to the incomplete self-analysis of Sons and Lovers. In such accounts Sons and Lovers plays the part of the Urtext, the aboriginal document by which all succeeding texts may be explained. Daniel Weiss’s Oedipus in Nottingham: D.H. Lawrence is the classic example. Weiss reads Sons and Lovers as ‘a coin whose reverse is the remainder of Lawrence’s works’, 57 and concludes: It is unfortunate for Lawrence, as indeed it is for any artist, that his nature cannot imitate his art, so that with the esthetically satisfying resolution of his novel there could be also take place the psychologically satisfying resolution of his neurosis.58 Various reasons are offered for Lawrence’s failure in self-analysis. Mark Schorer thought him deficient in the objective literary technique necessary to ‘take the place of the absent analyst’.59 The evidence of this deficiency, he argued, was threefold: the optimism of the final paragraph, the shared ambivalence of narrator and hero towards Mr and Mrs Morel and the lack of authorial objectivity in distributing the blame between Paul and Miriam for their failed relationship. Daniel Weiss disputed these criticisms and defended the oedipal structure of the book, but argued

56  Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism that Lawrence, in his incomplete knowledge of oedipal theory, shifted the responsibility for incestuous longings from the child to the parent, thereby absolving Paul of responsibility and distorting the structure of the book.60 More recently, Roland Pierloot has argued that Lawrence’s intellectual knowledge of oedipal theory served as a resistance against its emotional implications; he used it to construct ‘a defensive rationalisation of affective and relational problems’ that can only be properly dealt with in an analytic setting.61 All such criticisms claim Lawrence is too close to his text, unconsciously too emotionally involved, making the novel a symptom of the condition it describes, with its literary flaws demonstrating an imperfect self-analysis. Given the temptation to pathologise the novel in this way, and to think we know more of Lawrence than he knew himself, it is worthwhile approaching the book as Graham Hough did, and as I have done here, with an eye to its ‘different strata of composition’.62 The editorial work of Carl and Helen Baron enables us to study its development in a detail impossible in 1956 when Graham Hough published The Dark Sun. We can now see clearly the shift from the version begun by the man intent upon marrying Louie Burrows in 1911 to the novel completed by the man living with Frieda Weekley in 1912; we can watch him excise his praise of ‘honorable self-sacrifice’ from the text (PM 74) and look instead to individual self-fulfilment. His battle to prevent Frieda returning to her family reinforced this new sense that maternal self-sacrifice like that of Mrs Morel was ‘a curse’ to her children (1L 486). The shift in his thinking was from still further away from ‘goodness’ towards ‘life’; and it introduced a new complication into the moral scheme of the book, reflected in greater criticism of the mother and – pace John Worthen and Helen Baron63 – more sympathetic treatment of the father. It also facilitated the development of a new narrative voice, which needs consideration in any discussion of the faults of the novel. If Lawrence had written his novel with an omniscient narrator, Sons and Lovers might have been a roman à thèse like J.D. Beresford’s An Imperfect Mother (1920). ‘Paul Morel’ was originally conceived in this way, but as it developed it became more dramatic, its moral stance more open. Lawrence evolved a technique specifically for this book, a technique for ambivalence, creating characters who appear differently at different times and describing them with a free indirect narrator who judges and sympathises differently at different times. Lascelles Abercrombie thought odi et amo should have been its epigraph;64 but the ambivalence he saw in its characters is also the defining quality of its narrative, giving the novel its depth, richness and truth to life. Barbara Ann Schapiro praises Lawrence’s narrative style for embodying ‘the complex dialectic of projection and awareness – projection of one’s own inner world and empathic awareness of the inner world of the other – that distinguishes real human relationships’; such an intersubjective style, she says, belongs

Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism  57 to the unending struggle to develop and sustain ‘the capacity to tolerate dependency, ambivalence, and aloneness’.65 Like an Impressionist painter, Lawrence refuses to draw ‘a thick black line’ around his characters (1L 522). The ‘gaps’ in the novel mentioned by Frieda to Garnett are not only gaps in plot but also in characterisation (1L 479), and what are often considered faults – the split presentation between good and bad in both parents, the opaque presentation of Paul’s relationships with Miriam and Clara – constitute its meaning. An audience watching Hamlet effortlessly integrates the different aspects of the hero’s character appearing in different scenes, and Sons and Lovers expects the same. The parallel with drama is one that Lawrence himself made; his two main literary models were plays and, in writing the book, he told Garnett, he relished ‘the joy in creating vivid scenes’, in ‘accumulating objects in the powerful light of emotion, and making a scene of them’ (2L 142). Between 1909 and 1913 Lawrence wrote six plays; and Sons and Lovers, with its erlebte Rede, resembles them in that it participates in the condition which it describes – not as a symptom expresses an illness, unconsciously, but as a conscious dramatisation and imaginative elaboration of a situation originating in personal life but transcending the autobiographical in its art. There is no obvious moral to Sons and Lovers; the narrator is not authoritative in that way, and the reader must work as hard as the audience of Oedipus Rex or Hamlet to find a meaning. The technique, however, is adequate to the topic, the consciousness at work in the text adequate to the unconscious origins of its subject. Ambivalence recognises itself in mixed feelings. We may make the biographical judgement that Lawrence did not shed his sickness as fully as he had hoped (though The Rainbow will show an astonishing transformation in his writing self), but it is difficult to argue that solely from a literary study of Sons and Lovers. * Daniel Weiss thought Lawrence’s knowledge of Freud imperfect, and his self-analysis faulty, because he blamed his oedipal feelings on his parents rather than assume responsibility for them himself; but this neglects two important differences between Lawrence and Freud – differences that qualify any statement that Sons and Lovers is a Freudian novel. First, Lawrence’s letter to Garnett made clear that William and Paul had been emotionally seduced by their mother: ‘as her sons grow up she selects them as lovers’, he wrote. It is not the sexuality but the sexualisation of childhood that he portrays, the perverse, premature awakening of sexuality through parental exploitation. For Freud the Oedipus complex was diphasic; originating in infantile unconsciousness, it underwent ‘reactivation’ in adolescence when, though occasionally emerging as conscious incestuous fantasy, it usually manifested itself only as a powerful spiritual attachment to the mother.66 It was the spiritualisation of an

58  Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism unconscious sexual desire, a sublimation caused by fear of the father. Sons and Lovers shows the opposite of this: the adolescent sexualisation of an infantile spiritual attachment that Lawrence defines consistently as belonging to the ‘soul’. It is impossible to say exactly what Frieda knew of Freud in 1912, or what she said to Lawrence; but discussion of the Oedipus complex must have raised the question of infantile sexuality, a question that had also been central to Gross’s political quarrel with Freud. For all his Vaterbekämpfung, there is no mention anywhere in Gross’s writings of the Oedipus complex; like Lawrence after him, he attributed the premature sexualisation of children to parental pathology and used it as part of his armoury against patriarchy. The sexualisation of William’s and Paul’s feelings for their mother occurs late in boyhood; but Sons and Lovers makes it quite clear that the real damage was done to them earlier, at a pre-oedipal – or even, in Paul’s case, an intrauterine – stage. Lawrence himself continued to believe all his life that the oedipal analysis of his own suffering, though relevant, did not go back early enough. In response to this emphasis on the first stages of life, a number of critics have recently offered pre-oedipal analyses of Paul Morel’s life, and of Lawrence’s too. James Cowan has given an admirable account of how readings of Sons and Lovers have been influenced by four different traditions of psychoanalytic inquiry which, following Fred Pine, he calls ‘the psychologies of drive, ego, object relations, and self’.67 The classical oedipal analyses of the novel, based on drive, have been subsumed into later developments in psychoanalysis grounded in earlier periods of childhood. Some of these accounts, like that of Shirley Pankin and the excellent study by Barbara Ann Schapiro, have dealt primarily with the manifest content of the novel.68 Others, like those of Marguerite Beede Howe, Judith Ruderman, Jeffrey Berman and James Cowan himself, have been more concerned for its latent content, discussing the problems that beset the infant Paul in his search for identity, selfhood or relationship as part of the larger analysis of Lawrence himself.69 Not content to see the text, they see through it to its author. All these latter inquiries establish perspectives that enable us to weave aspects of Lawrence’s life and work into a richer narrative, though at the risk of blurring the boundaries between art and autobiography, of privileging psychoanalytic theory over literary text and collapsing fiction into case-history. The ‘strange design’ of Sons and Lovers is threatened by overlinings from elsewhere – the very cause of Lawrence’s rage at Kuttner’s essay in the Psychoanalytic Review. The pre-oedipal damage done to Paul Morel is epitomised in the new episode that Lawrence wrote in autumn 1912 for the start of Chapter 4, where Paul damages, then burns, his sister’s doll. Its structural role is to anticipate the later conspiracy with his sister to hasten their mother’s death, but its immediate interest is in what it reveals about the continuity of Paul’s motives throughout his life. He cannot bear the damage he

Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism  59 has inflicted on the doll through what Barbara Ann Schapiro calls his ‘furious assertion of his bodily, passionate self’;70 hence he must burn it, reduce it to ashes, obliterate it altogether. Behind this lies the deeper fear that the damaged doll will upset his mother, and what he really cannot tolerate is to see her damaged; he cannot bear the anxiety her pain causes him, and when at the novel’s end he and Annie hasten her death, it is less to ease her pain than to ease their own. They each ‘had one tight place of anxiety in their hearts, one darkness in their eyes, which showed all their lives’ (SL 85). In Schopenhauerian language, this is the place where the will-to-live transmutes into the will-to-die. What lies at the root of Paul’s love for his mother is not erotic desire but fear of annihilating anxiety, of what Winnicott calls ‘unthinkable or archaic anxiety’,71 threatening the existence of his self. Hence his hypersensitive attentiveness towards his mother, his desire that everything should be perfect for her, his sentimental vision of the idyllic cottage-life they should share and his anguish at her ageing and her final illness. Paul’s closeness to his mother – which Lawrence in his own case called ‘fusion of soul’ (1L 190) – originates in the mother’s hatred of her husband which, instilled early in her child, irretrievably damages his growth into independent selfhood. Paul’s hatred of his father thus lies deeper in infancy than oedipal castration anxiety; and yet, although in childhood both William and Paul love their mother and hate their father, in adolescence they increasingly resist their mother and model themselves on Morel, copying the liveliness and swagger of his ways. We see it in William’s dancing and in the way that Paul, having made love to Clara, begins to speak and act like his father. Even the free indirect narrator at this point begins to call him ‘Morel’. This is the full oedipal constellation, with each child ambivalent towards each parent – a constellation not formulated by Freud until 1923 in The Ego and the Id. The tragedy for the boys is that they cannot resolve their ambivalence. The unhappiness of their parents’ marriage is reproduced in a split between soul and body, between goodness and life, that eventually kills William and brings Paul to final dereliction. Their mother partially sustains their need for ‘real living’ (SL 183), as when her presence supports Paul in his painting; but all too often, depressed herself, she depresses their liveliness in pursuit of a bourgeois respectability that reinforces her sense of herself against her husband. But with each son the ‘bodily, passionate self’ will out, and so the split deepens. It was out of this split between life and goodness that Lawrence would make his own art. Like Paul Morel, ‘quickly’ setting out for the glowing town after his mother’s death, driven by the doggedness that was her bequest, his will-to-life stronger than his will-to-death, Lawrence doggedly pursued a career dedicated to spontaneity – to ‘real living’, the rest being ‘a dead crust’. The matrix of his creativity was a strong desire for liveliness that would break through the crust of his anxiety; and the transgressiveness of his fictions, from the adultery of The Trespasser to

60  Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism the incestuous feelings of Sons and Lovers, creates that life by resisting the ‘goodness’ with which his mother had stifled him. The doll that is damaged must be destroyed with all the ceremonies of art so that the living self may rise like a phoenix from the ashes of its own death.72 Lawrence’s belief that incestuous desire is the perverse result of bad parenting is his first major difference from Freud, and the second is his recognition that bad parenting reflects cultural values. If Freud was a scientist discovering universal truth, Lawrence was a novelist discovering history. Sons and Lovers is a historical record of the same ‘deadly war waged between flesh and spirit’ that Hardy had traced in Jude the Obscure.73 He had, he told Garnett, written ‘the tragedy of thousands of young men in England – it may even be Bunny’s tragedy. I think it was Ruskin’s, and men like him’ (1L 477). Paul Morel, in Kuttner’s words, is ‘sick with the problems of his generation’: A good many of the nicest men he knew were like himself, bound in by their own virginity, which they could not break out of. They were so sensitive to their women, that they would go without them for ever rather than do them a hurt, an injustice. Being the sons of mothers whose husbands had blundered rather brutally through their feminine sanctities, they were themselves too diffident and shy. They could easier deny themselves than incur any reproach from a woman. For a woman was like their mother, and they were full of the sense of their mother. They preferred themselves to suffer the misery of celibacy, rather than risk the other person. (SL 323) The direct thrust of this paragraph, surely dating from autumn 1912, is aimed against the brutality of men like Morel and Baxter Dawes, but its ironic reference to ‘feminine sanctities’ also makes an indirect hit against the bourgeois pretensions of their wives. Lawrence is writing a cultural history of late nineteenth-century intergenerational gender roles in ‘a society that narrowly defines the roles that men and women may properly play’,74 and his condemnation falls equally on the bourgeois morality of the women and the repressed manhood of their husbands and sons. The story of the Dawes’s marriage was invented for precisely this purpose, with its conclusion fit to rival an Ibsen play as Clara returns in an ecstasy of self-sacrifice to the man whom she has already destroyed. Jessie Chambers thought Lawrence’s problem merely personal: ‘the complete divorce in his mind and attitude between love and sex’, she thought, was caused by his love for his mother.75 But Lawrence understood this split between sacred and profane love as a cultural phenomenon characteristic of his society. Many critics have noted the ‘almost schematic correspondence’76 between Sons and Lovers and Freud’s contemporaneous essays ‘A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men’

Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism  61 (1910) and ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’ (1912), where the Oedipus complex is isolated as the cause of the ‘psychical impotence’ that troubles men such as Paul Morel. ‘Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love’, Freud wrote.77 The synchronicity is unsurprising; the sense of masculinity in crisis was widespread. Freud saw as clearly as Lawrence or Gross the power of ‘civilised’ sexual morality to split desire from love; but his concern was wider, with the Oedipus complex as ‘a universal event in early childhood’, a transhistorical truth that lay at ‘the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art’.78 What to Freud was universal, however, was to Lawrence relative, to be understood only by reference to its historical context; insight into the mind was a function of social structure. If Sons and Lovers is a Freudian novel – in that Freudian ideas, mediated by Frieda Weekley, played a significant part in the development of its mythos from March 1912 onwards – it also has tendencies that sow the seeds for a future critique of Freud: it prioritises the pre-oedipal life of the child and, despite its tragic affiliation with Oedipus Rex and Hamlet, its historical specificity implies a world that can and should be changed. Lawrence had a streak of the same ‘Messiany’ nature as Frieda and Gross, and in his next novel The Rainbow he would set out to show how the energies generated by an oedipal crisis can be harnessed to personal and social transformation.

Notes 1 For Freud’s reputation in England, see R.D. Hinshelwood, ‘Psychoanalysis in Britain: Points of Cultural Access, 1893–1918, in International Journal of Psychoanalysis vol. 76 (1995), pp. 135–51; Edward Glover, ‘Psychoanalysis in England’, in Psychoanalytic Pioneers, ed. by Franz Alexander, Samuel Eisenstein and Martin Grotjahn (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1966), pp.  534–45; R.D. Hinshelwood, ‘Psychodynamic Psychiatry before World War I’, in 150 Years of British Psychiatry 1841–1991, ed. by B. German and H. Freeman (London: Gaskell, 1991), pp.  197–205; Malcolm Pines, ‘The development of the Psychodynamic Movement’, in ibid., pp. 206–31; Dean Rapp, ‘The Early Discovery of Freud by the British General Educated Public, 1912–1919’, in Social History of Medicine, vol. 3 no. 2 (August, 1990), pp. 217–43; and Dean Rapp, ‘The Reception of Freud by the British Press: General Interest and Literary Magazines, 1920–25’, in Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences vol. 24 (April, 1988), pp. 191–201. 2 Pines, p. 210. 3 For Jones’s comments on Gross, see Ernest Jones, Free Associations: Memories of a Psycho-Analyst (London: The Hogarth Press, 1959), pp. 173–4; for Jones’s affair with Frieda Gross, see Ken Robinson, ‘A Portrait of the Psychoanalyst as a Bohemian: Ernest Jones and the “Lady from Styria”’, in Psychoanalysis and History vol. 15 no. 2 (July, 2013), pp. 165–89. 4 Alfred E. Randall, in The New Age, vol. 11 no. 1 (2 May, 1912), p. 14. 5 Dean Rapp, ‘The Early Discovery of Freud’, p. 242. 6 For what remains the best guide to May Sinclair and psychoanalysis see Theophilus Boll, ‘May Sinclair and the Medico-Psychological Clinic of

62  Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31

London’, in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, no. 106 (August, 1962), pp. 310–26. Helen Baron, ‘Sons and Lovers: The Surviving Manuscripts from Three Drafts Dated by Paper Analysis’, in Studies in Bibliography vol. 38 (1985), p. 298. Jessie Chambers, D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 111. John Worthen, D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 282. Oedipus King of Thebes, trans. by Gilbert Murray (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1911), p. vi. This paragraph is indebted to Helen Baron’s excellent detective work on the surviving manuscripts of Sons and Lovers. See n. 7 above. The text is given in Worthen, Appendix III, p. 499. Baron, p. 290. Worthen, p. 279. The outline of ‘Paul Morel I’ is given on pp. 278–9. Ibid., p. 281. Chambers, p. 184. George Hyde, D.H. Lawrence (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 30. Simon O. Lesser, Fiction and the Unconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 176n. Oedipus King of Thebes, p. 74. Edward Carpenter, Love’s Coming-of-Age: A Series of Papers on the Relations of the Sexes (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1896), p. 40. These passages are easily recognisable in the facsimile edition of Sons and Lovers edited by Mark Schorer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) by their characteristic paper size; they describe William’s death (pp. 182–92), the early stages of the relationship between Paul and M iriam (pp. 204–26), the Friday night episode (pp. 272–81), Paul’s letters to Miriam and Arthur’s marriage to Beatrice (pp.  309–18), Clara’s appointment at Jordan’s (pp. 328–33) and, lastly, Paul’s birthday at Jordan’s and his walk to Nottingham Castle with Clara (pp. 337–47). All references to ‘Paul Morel’ III in this section refer to this facsimile edition. These are, in the facsimile edition, pp. 332–3 and pp. 337–47. Chambers, p. 192. Ford Madox Hueffer, quoted in D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, ed. by Edwards Nehls, 3 vols (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957–59), I, pp. 116, 119. Chambers, p. 204. This second method of reckoning was undertaken by John Worthen. My work on the dating of the Friday Night passage is again indebted to Helen Baron’s essay on the surviving manuscripts. Unless, as is just possible, he had read Alfred E. Randall’s review of Ernest Jones’s essay ‘The Oedipus-Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: A Study in Motive’ (1910) in The New Age on 15 February, at the home of one of his radical Eastwood friends. See Chapter 3:1 below. See Worthen, p. 381. G.H. Neville, A Memoir of D.H. Lawrence (The Betrayal), ed. by Carl Baron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 26. Susan Carlson Galenbeck, ‘A Stormy Apprenticeship: Lawrence’s Three Comedies’, in The D.H. Lawrence Review no. 14 (1981), pp. 191–211. Georg Simmel, ‘Flirtation’, in Georg Simmel: On Women, Sexuality, and Love, trans. by Guy Oakes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 135.

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64  Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism

























3

The Rainbow Oedipus Unbound

I The Short Stories of 1913: Vicissitudes of the ‘Physical Soul’ In late spring 1913 Lawrence wrote three new short stories: ‘Honour and Arms’ (now known as ‘The Prussian Officer’), ‘Vin Ordinaire’ (later rewritten as ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’) and ‘New Eve and Old Adam’. They mark a fresh stage in his development, grounded in his new experience of German culture and his new relationship with Frieda. Sons and Lovers had staged an oedipal tragedy; but now, relishing the daily challenge of living in close sexual relationship with a woman, Lawrence wanted to celebrate sexual fulfilment. He would ‘do my life work, sticking up for the love between man and woman’ (1L 492), he told his Fabian friend Sallie Hopkin. In Gross’s words he would celebrate ‘the pure great third thing’ of relationship (das reine grosse Dritte)1 and write out boldly on behalf of women against the patriarchal world that prevented their self-realisation: ‘I shall do my work for women, better than the suffrage’ (1L 490), he declared. Sexual fulfilment with Frieda did not come easily, however. As she recalled, there were ‘so many battles to fight out’: ‘the ordinary manand-woman fight’, ‘the class war’ and beyond class ‘the difference in race’. 2 In the spring of 1912 Frieda had wanted to ‘prance theories’ (1L 439) about free love, but Lawrence had resisted her: ‘it is a great thing for me to marry you’, he told her, ‘not a quick, passionate coming together. I know in my heart ‘“here’s my marriage”’ (1L 403). If Frieda wanted a quick ‘coming together’ or a brief affair, Lawrence wanted long-term commitment. Two years later, on the eve of their marriage, he spelt out the difficulties of such commitment to Sir Thomas Dunlop: To love, you have to learn to understand the other, more than she understands herself, and to submit to her understanding of you. It is damnably difficult and painful, but it is the only thing which endures. (2L 191)

66  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound If Frieda was learning a new ‘understanding of things and people, that is morality’ (1L 439), Lawrence was learning a new moral language for relationship, grounded in the same dialectical sense of self and other as Gross’s das Eigene and das Fremde, and it is this deepened sense of otherness that underpins the short stories of 1913. In Barbara Ann Schapiro’s words, ‘the stories portray characters urgently seeking selfrealisation, but that self-realisation is possible only in relation to a fully recognised other, a separate, independent other capable of granting recognition to the self’.3 Lawrence’s difficulties with Frieda fed into what Mark KinkeadWeekes calls the ‘disturbing new psychological probing’ of the 1913 stories.4 The autumn and winter of 1912–13 had been hard for them both. They had felt vulnerable earlier, at Icking, 5 but now, ‘buried alive’ in North Italy (1L 531), their sense of vulnerability intensified. They were isolated, poor, with uncertain prospects, and harassed by letters from Frieda’s husband and her German family that exacerbated the pain of her separation from her children. The Fight for Barbara, written almost immediately after reaching Italy, shows how each felt persecuted by the insecurities of the other. As Frieda put it, ‘we live so hard on each other one day like the lions that ate each other, there will be nothing but two tails left’ (1L 521). When Lawrence denounced Frieda’s narcissism, she attacked his delusional chauvinism: Wesson, Barbara retorts, bullies her ‘like the old savages’ (Plays 248). Such mutual hostility characterises the new stories of 1913 where, in Barbara Ann Schapiro’s words again, ‘sadomasochistic fantasies’ emerge ‘out of the breakdown of mutual recognition’6 – a recognition that must take place at ‘the level of the body’,7 the woman confirming the man in his manliness and the man confirming the woman in her womanliness. But such mutual corroboration often eluded Lawrence and Frieda in 1912 and 1913. Like many men alienated by patriarchal ideas of manliness, Lawrence was troubled by the question of masculine identity; and his battles with Frieda did not help. Life in Italy sharpened his perception of the problem; for Italian village men offered an image of masculinity that highlighted his limitations as an Englishman. Italian men, he thought, had ‘strong blood’ (1L 460); and when he saw Ghosts and Hamlet in the local church at Gargnano, he identified immediately what he disliked about Ibsen and Shakespeare, and the whole North European culture out of which they sprang. The performance of Hamlet was on 16 January 1913, and the following day he wrote to Ernest Collings: ‘My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect’ (1L 503). In writing this, as G.M. Hyde noted, Lawrence ‘was making a point about wisdom as well as a point about  blood’;8 he was preaching the disciplined attentiveness to bodily emotion that Christian meditation had once given to the motions of grace. It was the ebb and flow of hatred and desire that constituted life; and this, he

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  67 thought, was felt more easily in Italy. ‘The people are so unconscious’, he went on. ‘They only feel and want: they don’t know. We know too much’. Hamlet, typical of the modern Englishman, symbolises the man who knows too much. ‘We cannot be. “To be or not to be” – it is the question with us now, by Jove. And nearly every Englishman says “Not to be”’. It is the answer that Paul Morel only just avoids at the end of Sons and Lovers. In the Italian sketches of 1913, probably written in mid-March, Lawrence found the incongruity of an Italian man acting a North European tragic hero disgusting: ‘I saw the natural man of hot heart, crawling to an anaemic tune, and it made me sick’ (TI 76). His attack on Hamlet as ‘a phosphorescent fish’ (TI 78), unable to feel or love, was simultaneously an attack on his own former self; for Hamlet, like Osvald, belonged to the same incestuous stock as Paul Morel. But now, he told Garnett, ‘I loathe Paul Morel’ (1L 427). The medical diagnosis of Hamlet’s anaemia is no empty metaphor; it is a biological hypothesis, a provisional reading in the biochemistry of life, struggling to articulate the unconscious living processes of the gendered human body and the damage caused by its denial. It is Lawrence’s attempt, in a new place, to find a new post-oedipal self. This belief in the life of the body was not wholly new to Lawrence in 1913. Already in The Trespasser, he had dramatised his reverence for the physical motions of life in Helena’s fascination with the throb of Siegmund’s heart, ‘with its great expulsions of life’ (T 79). But now, in 1913, his love of Frieda and his experience of Italy gave new life to an old belief in the bodily unconscious, a new desire for its corroboration and, particularly, a new awareness of the many ways it may be denied – an awareness further sharpened by the shock of returning to Germany in mid-April. ‘After Italy I hate Germany – it feels so narrow and cruel. These moral folk have such a cruel feel about them’ (1L 543). In Germany, as in England, he sensed ‘the gloom of the dark moral judgment and condemnation and reservation of the people’ (1L 544). Such puritanism denied the liveliness of the self and repressed the liveliness of others. It was his sensitivity to this, in Irschenhausen in the late spring of 1913, stimulated by the new intellectual world of Frieda and her German family, that prompted the three short stories that, in their different ways, explore the vicissitudes of the repressed instinctual life of the body. * In their 1913 versions, as published the following year in The English Review, ‘Honour and Arms’ and ‘Vin Ordinaire’ are stories of German military life, each telling the story of a man who, lacking inner sufficiency of life, ‘had acquiesced to the great fact of the Army, and so had more or less identified himself with it’ (VicG 162). In ‘Vin Ordinaire’ the

68  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound ironically named Bachmann (‘man of the stream’), in his fear of heights, struggles to climb fortifications to prove that ‘his will, sufficiently identifying itself with the will of the Army, could control his body’ (VicG 162). He sees this as his supreme test and feels a failure when he involuntarily wets himself; but the bigger failure is his preference for das Fremde of military life over the idiosyncratic impulses of his own body. In ‘Honour and Arms’, the Captain’s insufficiency of life is expressed as cruelty towards his more lively orderly. The story recalls a letter that Lawrence had written to Garnett the previous autumn, following lengthy discussions with Frieda about Jeanne D’Arc, Garnett’s new play: Cruelty is a form of perverted sex. I want to dogmatise. Priests in their celibacy get their sex lustful, then perverted, then insane, hence Inquisitions – all sexual in origin. And soldiers, being herded together, men without women, never being satisfied by a woman, as a man never is from a street affair, get their surplus sex and their frustration and dissatisfaction into the blood, and love cruelty. It is sex lust fermented makes atrocity. (1L 469) This is a serious intensification of the hygienic views expressed in ‘The Married Man’ about the harmfulness of sexual repression, and Lawrence has found a new dimension to his own physiological language in order to explore it. In April he informed Arthur McLeod of an author who must have ‘a “complexe” – some sexual twist – that he likes physical hurt as he does. Those old inquisitors and Sadists and Caligulas of course had perverted sex – which was why they “savoured” those nasty hurts’ (L.i.543–4). Both complex and sadist were neologisms whose success was down to the psychoanalytic discourse familiar to Frieda and Else. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Freud had noted the ‘intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct’,9 but had done little to elucidate it other than to define sadism as an exorbitation of ‘an aggressive component of the sexual instinct’ caused by the inhibiting power of shame, disgust or pain. Sadism and masochism, on the other hand, were central to Gross’s politicisation of psychoanalytic thinking. It was no accident that Stekel included his case-history in a volume entitled Sadismus und Masochismus. He analysed Gross as someone who in childhood had been sadistic towards women and masochistic towards men but who, by a great reversal of values, had made himself masochistic towards women (favouring Mutterrecht) and sadistic towards men (deploring Vaterrecht) – a repressive act of idealisation responsible for the morphine addiction that finally killed him. ‘All sado-masochists are parent-sick!’ Stekel concluded.10 But such pathologisation sidesteps the actual worth of Gross’s ideas about

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  69 sado-masochism. In Über psychopathische Minderwertigkeiten (1909), a book surely known to Else, Gross followed Freud’s account of the origins of sadism but expanded it significantly. Affiliating Freudian ideas to Nietzsche’s ‘discipline of biological sociology’,11 he diagnosed individual pathology as the historical expression of prevailing social conditions. Men today, he argued, suffer from repression both of the male instinct of aggression, which leaves them angry and vindictive, and of sexual desire, which leaves them vulnerable to sexual envy (Sexualneid), the need to besmirch all that is lovely in sex. Such envious destructiveness fuels a long list of perversions, including the sadism whose essential feature is revenge against women and sexuality. Sex lust fermented makes atrocity, as Lawrence dogmatically put it. Ressentiment, ‘envy and rage’ provide his starting-point for ‘Honour and Arms’,12 driving the sadomasochistic fantasies that swamp all moral sense of otherness in its leading characters. The homoerotic elements of the tale also recall Gross; for whilst Gross valued ‘primary homosexuality’ and hoped to liberate it from the repressiveness of bourgeois society, the ‘secondary homosexuality’ that he thought typical of that society bore the same sado-masochistic stamp as all erotic relationships under the rape constellation of patriarchy. His paper ‘Anmerkungen zu einer neuen Ethik’, published in autumn 1913 but expressing ideas surely already disseminated in Munich cafés, describes the political structure that gives secondary homosexuality its sado-masochistic character; and it opens with an emblem that has a direct equivalent in Lawrence’s story: ‘The state itself bears the symbol of homosexuality. It is hierarchically structured: that is, there is always one man pressing down upon another’ (Der Staat selbst trägt das homosexuelle Symbol. Er ist hierarchisch aufgebaut, das ist: einer lastet immer auf dem andern).13 What is true of the German state is equally true of its army; and the weighty sexualised authority of the Captain in Lawrence’s story, bearing down on his young orderly, together with its ironic reversal in the murder scene where the orderly finally mounts the Captain in order to kill him, read like fictional embodiments of Gross’s aphorism. The dualistic structure of the story, dramatising ‘the tragic split between our mental and sensual being’,14 has often been observed; but what drives the tale is the Captain’s sexual envy, hovering between desire and destructive hatred, for the young man who enjoys the rich emotional life of the body. That these were life-issues for Lawrence himself is clear from the first draft of ‘The Sisters’ right through to Women in Love: envy was the fellow-contrary of his love for the richly vital Frieda and for friends like David Garnett whose physical prowess, whilst attracting Frieda, left him ‘green with envy’ (1L 429). It is no accident that the orderly in ‘Honour and Arms’ is called Schöner (in German, more beautiful); for to the Captain, like Cassio to Iago, ‘He has a daily beauty in his life, / That makes me ugly’ (Othello V. 1. 19–20). The readiest defence against such

70  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound inner annihilation is, as Gross and Shakespeare knew, sadistic revenge. ‘Honour and Arms’ is a study in abuse, initiated by envious acts of sexualised cruelty that penetrate deep into Schöner’s soul, and their violence is infectious. John Haegert has described ‘the transgressive logic’ that finally ‘blurs and “obliterates”’ the dualisms of the story;15 the Captain and his orderly undergo what René Girard calls a ‘violent mimesis’, each becoming ‘a mirror image of the other’16 until finally they both lie naked and emptied of life, side by side in the morgue. If ‘Vin Ordinaire’ and ‘Honour and Arms’ show the repression of bodily life within the patriarchal institution of the army, ‘New Eve and Old Adam’ shows it in a modern marriage where the New Woman predominates over her docile husband. The tale – ‘autobiographical’, according to Lawrence (2L 21) – traces the failing marriage of Peter and Paula Moest to their neglect of the communications of their own bodies. Lawrence had told Collings that ‘what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true’ (1L 503); but here the blood is not ‘strong’ enough to make itself heard. In a story of letters, talk and telegrams that race along the telegraph wires criss-crossing the city’s ‘netted sky’ (LAH 162), the modern need to communicate with others appears as a manic defence against the more fundamental need to communicate with oneself. The whole modernist crisis of identity, gender and relationship is latent here, and it is Lawrence’s belief that only the language of the blood can resolve it. In Winnicott’s language the self must be personalised, authenticated in the liveliness of the body. ‘The ego is essentially a body-ego’, he wrote, ‘not a matter of the intellect’.17 But in this story the gendered biology of the body is inaccessible behind the cultural idealisms of the mind. The event that constitutes the ‘plot’ of the story is deliberately fortuitous: a telegram intended for a Richard Moest, who coincidentally lives in the same block of flats, is delivered to Peter and Paula Moest by mistake. Symbolically it represents the prevalence of méconnaissance in contemporary human relations; throughout the tale communications miscarry, as Peter and Paula misjudge one another’s meanings and emotions. They suffer from what Derrida calls a ‘pathology of destination’, always misdirecting themselves, addressing themselves to ‘someone else’18 other than the other before them. Misled perpetually by fantasy, they are driven to enlist a series of third parties into their relationship, from the linesman whom Paula sees at work amidst the telegraph wires to the Richard Moest who will soon enter the triangular drama of their marriage. The coincidence that he should live under the same roof finds its fictional justification in his symbolic role as Doppelgänger, focussing the psychological truth of Paula’s narcissistic discontent and her husband’s sexual envy. What attracts Paula to Richard Moest is that he is a literary man with little experience of life. He belongs to that type of ‘conventionalised literary person’ whom Lawrence called ‘Asphodels’ (1L 491). A translator of Shakespeare, he lives vicariously through his work and comes alive only

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  71 in ‘an atmosphere of literature and literary ideas’ (LAH 174). He is living proof of Kierkegaard’s dictum that ‘there are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys; they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves’.19 In this tale of communication and non- communication, he is a professional communicator, ‘a man whose business it was to say things that should be listened to’ (LAH 174); yet, Doppelgänger that he is, he always addresses his talk to ‘an imaginary audience’ (LAH 175). The salvation from such solipsism lies in relationship; and Paula, with missionary zeal, immediately wishes to rescue him from the ‘miserable starved isolation’ of his life by making love to him (LAH 177). Peter is duly angry, humiliated and jealous, especially since it was this same missionary zeal that had involved her with him one year before. Paula is threatening to become a serial sexual emancipator, and bitterly her husband reflects that he has not touched her life at all. ‘She’s got a big heart for everybody’, he thinks, ‘but it must be like a common room: she’s got no private, sacred heart, except perhaps for herself’ (LAH 176). She may be full of generosity and bigness and kindness, he goes on, ‘but there was no heart in her, no security, no place for one single man’ (LAH 177). Else Jaffe reproached Otto Gross because, adopting the role of ‘the prophet’, he sacrificed ‘the capacity to love persons individually in their individuality’, and she warned Frieda against his all-consuming professional preoccupation with saving people (Rettungstätigkeit). 20 Peter Moest encounters similar problems with Paula. He cannot relate to ‘a charitable institution’ (LAH 177) and feels annulled by her liberationist fantasies. His feeble retaliatory attempts to stimulate jealousy arouse her derision, and his dependence is so abject that he could imagine himself her slave. Else Jaffe had challenged Gross’s idea of free love with the Weberian categorical imperative of marriage, of one particular wife loved for her own individual sake (ein bestimmtes, um seiner Eigenart willen geliebtes Weib). 21 Here too it is marriage that Peter wants: ‘flesh of my flesh – a wife –?’ (LAH 182). He wants long-term commitment, and this Paula will not give. In real life, faced with a man who wanted ‘marriage’ of her, Frieda had struggled between what she called ‘2 sides to human love, one that wants to be faithful, the other wants to run’ (1L 498). Stekel had identified the same conflict in Gross. ‘On the one side, sexual freedom; on the other, marriage’, with Gross torn between them, unable to live without the person from whom he was already preparing to flee. 22 In ‘New Eve and Old Adam’ as in The Married Man, Lawrence satirises the Rettungstätigkeit of those who, like Frieda and Gross, believed in the saving power of free love. Sex is not ‘as open and as common and as simple as any other human conversation’ (MN 193). The words are from Mr Noon, but they pick up the spirit of ‘New Eve and Old Adam’ in their belief that such theories express a deep dissociation between mind and body.

72  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound Lawrence encapsulates this dissociation in a striking image: the split between mind and body, between the ego and the unconscious of his two protagonists is so great that they seem to be living on a pleasure pier ignorant of the elemental sea surging beneath it. Their marriage had begun well, but now Paula is freeing herself ‘from the deep, underneath intimacy which had gradually come between them’ (LAH 172). She resists intimacy because she wants her life ‘for herself’; but without it, Peter feels, they are not real to themselves or to each other. The danger is of depersonalisation. ‘The other’s recognition’ is, as Schapiro says, essential ‘to the self’s experience of its own bodily reality’. 23 Paula’s theory of free love is a defence originating in what Stekel called ‘a flight from love’24 and what Winnicott calls ‘split-off intellectual functioning’. 25 But if Paula is at fault, so too is Peter. Dozing in the ‘neutrality’ of the hotel room where he has taken refuge (LAH 171), unconsciously he senses Paula’s struggle against him. But, awakening with ‘that air of neutral correctness which makes men seem so unreal’ (LAH 173), he disregards the sea-storm of his night-time emotions, and when she invites him – by telegram – to tea, despite a ‘great heave of resistance’ he goes. He too is out of touch with his own feelings, the masculinity of his body neutered by a repressive culture and husbandly compliance. Both Peter and Paula neglect their ‘physical soul’ (LAH 173), and their repressed sexual energies are displaced into ‘that battle between them which so many married people fight, without knowing why’ (LAH 161). Locked into what Hardy called ‘the antipathetic, recriminatory mood of the average husband and wife of Christendom’, 26 the sado-masochistic fantasies that fuel their mutual teasing and tormenting, whether inspired by wounded narcissism or Sexualneid, are as disruptive as the military bullying of ‘Vin Ordinaire’ and ‘Honour and Arms’. In marriage as in the army, the perverse institutions of bourgeois life overwhelm the fine dialectical interplay between self and other that constitutes morality.

II David Eder and the Quarrel between Freud and Jung In summer 1913 Lawrence and Frieda returned to England, she hoping to see her children and he to place enough short stories with magazines to finance another year in Italy. 27 Sons and Lovers had opened a way into literary circles, and it was now that they first met Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield. The following summer, on 24 June 1914, they returned again, to get married and to find a publisher for ‘The Sisters’; and now for the first time they made friends in psychoanalytic circles. The young novelist Ivy Low, who had celebrated Sons and Lovers as ‘a book about the Oedipus Complex!’ and visited Lawrence and Frieda in Italy on the strength of her enthusiasm, returned their hospitality by introducing them to two people amongst ‘the first English Freudians’28 – her aunt, Barbara Low, a school-teacher in Hackney with a growing

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  73 interest in psychoanalysis, and her brother-in-law David Eder, a doctor who had been actively popularising psychoanalysis since 1911. Eder was particularly free to talk to Lawrence during the last week of June and the first half of July since his second wife Edith, Barbara’s sister, was in Zurich for ‘a month’s analysis with Jung’, her second course of treatment with him. 29 Lawrence and Frieda stayed with Middleton Murry’s friend Gordon Campbell in South Kensington, and Murry has described the intensity of the conversations that Lawrence held with Eder there, probably during July before Eder left for the BMA conference at Aberdeen (29–31 July) and Lawrence for a week’s walking in the Lake District (31 July–8 August). At this particular moment his novel Sons and Lovers had been discovered by some of the Freudian psycho-analysts, who were enthusiastic about it because it exemplified some of Freud’s main theses: and Dr Eder then called more than once on Lawrence to discuss the doctrine, when I happened to be there. I was, as usual, quite ignorant about Freud; I knew his name and the significance he attached to dream-symbolism, also the word Traumbedeutung (sic); and that was about all. But I was bewildered by the tone of the discussion. I could not understand why the matter should be taken so seriously, as though it were one of life and death. When Dr Eder was gone, Lawrence would take me to task for my insouciance and my scepticism.30 In his Reminiscences of D.H. Lawrence, written two years earlier, Murry spoke more specifically of the ‘long queer discussions in the Campbells’ little drawing-room, over Oedipus-complexes and incest-motives’, consequent upon the discovery that ‘in Sons and Lovers Lawrence had independently arrived at the main conclusions of the psycho-analysts’. 31 It is Freud whom Murry mentions; but the talk must have been of Freud and Jung, and the differences between them. Mark Kinkead-Weekes is surely right to say that, in talking with Eder, Lawrence was now facing something altogether ‘more challenging than Frieda’s memories of conversations with Gross’.32 Eder was an impressive and likeable man, one of the very few people of whom Lawrence never spoke ill: ‘something right in him’ (3L 174), ‘a very delightful man’ (3L 716), ‘a friend of mine, a nice man, not a liar’ (5L 333). As John Carswell saw, it was Eder on whom Lawrence drew some years later in Kangaroo when characterising all that was benign in Benjamin Cooley: a man who, ‘with his smallish head carried rather forward on his large but sensitive, almost shy body’, was full of ‘wonderful, Jehovah-like kindliness’, of ‘kindly love for real, vulnerable human beings’ (K 108, 111).33 Eder was a man of wide experience. After some

74  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound years in business, he had trained as a doctor, practising in South America and South Africa. On returning to London in 1905, he worked in poorer districts where, with two colleagues, he set up school clinics to improve the health of the children. Impressed, the London County Council instituted its own scheme, and in 1908 made Eder Medical Officer for the London School Clinic. Then, in 1910, he helped Margaret McMillan found a Nursery School at Deptford, and became its Chief Medical Officer. A committed socialist and co-founder of the London Labour Party, he was active in the Socialist League, the Independent Labour Party and the Fabian Society where, in 1907, he set up a Biology Group to counter eugenicist propaganda. The following year he helped set up the Socialist Medical League, to co-ordinate the medical struggle for a nationalised health service. He had also been quick to involve himself with Orage’s The New Age, and from late 1907 contributed regularly on political, scientific and literary affairs. In 1908 the New Age Press had published his book The Endowment of Motherhood, and he continued to write for the paper until early 1910, when he left to found his own periodical School Hygiene, which he co-edited until 1915. In addition, he was closely associated with the Jewish Territorial Organisation, run by his cousin the novelist Israel Zangwill, and in 1908 had been to Cyrenaica to prospect for a Jewish homeland. It was a busy life, made busier still in 1910–12 by his enthusiastic pioneering work amongst doctors on behalf of Freudian psychoanalysis, pursued particularly through his membership of the Psycho-Medical Society. In July 1914, when Lawrence met Eder, psychoanalysis was not the monolithic ‘doctrine’ that Murry imagined; in January 1913 the tensions between Freud and Jung had erupted into open hostility, and the psychoanalytic world had begun to fragment. Eder’s initial response to the situation was that of the trained scientist: he refused to take sides, in the belief that questions of science were not matters of faith, and that different hypotheses should be put to the test of time. He argued, as Jones told Freud, that ‘Jung’s method constitutes a variety, and legitimate evolution, of Ps-A, and that the difference between his views and ours is not great enough to prohibit the possibility of cooperation in work’.34 It was an honourable position whose general acceptance, in John Kerr’s words, would have avoided ‘the adoption of authoritarian internal structures and theoretical conservatism’, and helped ‘to create an open organisation and also to put psychoanalysis on a potentially firm scientific footing’.35 In 1913 Eder had given a paper to the British Medical Association on ‘The Present Position of Psycho-Analysis’, in which he summarised the different positions of Freud, Jung and Adler, and concluded that, whilst they had all made ‘invaluable contributions’ to understanding the unconscious, none of them quite captured his own sense of ‘man’s ultimate psyche’.36 The paper excited the suspicions of Ernest Jones, who

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  75 was about to set up the London Psycho-Analytic Society and was busy policing the purity of Freudian theory in Britain. Was Eder defecting to Jung? But Freud, to whom Eder must have sent a copy, reassured him that the paper, though ‘full of misrepresentations’, was ‘not suspicious in intention’.37 Eder’s publications between 1912 and 1914 shows him dividing his loyalties more or less evenly between Freud and Jung. In 1912 he had revised the English text of Versuch einer Darstellung der psychoanalytischen Theorie for Jung to deliver as the Fordham lectures in America; then, having previously been pre-empted in his desire to translate Traumdeutung, 38 entrusted already to Brill, he translated Freud’s Über den Traum, which was published in spring 1914. The papers that he gave in the 18 months following the Freud-Jung quarrel maintain the same balance. ‘Stammering as a Psycho-Neurosis and its Treament by Psycho-Analysis’ (1913), ‘Borderland Cases’ (1914) and ‘The “Unconscious” Mind in the Child’ (1914), co-written with his wife, show a man drawing impartially on Freud and Jung in a scientific, non-sectarian pursuit of the workings of the unconscious mind.39 Like his pioneering paper of 1911, ‘A Case of Obsession and Hysteria treated by the Freud Psycho-Analytic Method’, these papers are not contributions to psychoanalytic theory but applications or popularisations of it. With warmth and sympathy Eder discusses minor psychopathologies such as shyness and stammering that cause great mental pain and impair the capacity to enjoy life. His psychoanalytic concern originates in political solidarity with those who cannot fulfil their potential, and his case-histories capture the flavour of their lives, not merely their illnesses. He told the BMA Conference in July 1914, just after his meeting with Lawrence, that one reason why the medical profession resisted psychoanalysis was because analytic writings fail to communicate the ‘scenes of warm, actual life’ which inspired them.40 Maybe Eder had been listening to Lawrence too. Heard in context, following a paper by Ernest Jones which Eder had read in Jones’s absence, his words sound like a direct criticism of a specifically English Freudianism. Indeed, Edith Eder later reproached Jones directly for the scientific coldness of his theoretical writing: ‘you do (deliberately?) desiccate feeling by your language – how can you talk of the one ennobling human emotion as “object love”?’41 It was a criticism made all the more fervently because she had been, and perhaps still was, in love with Jones herself. Probably she and her husband shared the view common amongst English doctors interested in psychoanalysis – like Rivers, whom they knew – that theories were only tools to be used, pragmatically as appropriate, and that the creation of a Weltanschauung was no business of medical science. As The Endowment of Motherhood shows, Eder, like Gross and Lawrence, was drawn to psychoanalysis by the sexual and political liberation it offered. But Eder differed from Gross in his unconcern for theoretical writing, and this was a cast of mind that would have endeared him to

76  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound Lawrence. At a time when, together with all the London psychoanalytic community, Eder was preoccupied by the quarrel between Freud and Jung, he would have been able to discuss their differences without dogmatism, and Lawrence, with his own quick interest in new ideas and his hostility to theory, would have been free to adapt them to creative ends. They were, moreover, differences about issues that concerned Lawrence directly. * It was in writing Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (1911–12) that Jung broke free from the influence of Freud. His wife described the second part of the book to Freud as ‘self-analysis’,42 and its theme of the resurrection of the hero from infantile dependence by the sacrifice of infantile pleasure was enacted in real life as Jung sacrificed the friendship of Freud and his position in the psychoanalytic world so that, in Nietzschean phrase, he might become the man he was. The book embodies the struggle it describes, and the obscurity of its prose suggests the difficulty of that struggle. The Fordham lectures, written immediately afterwards, are by comparison a model of clarity. Both books advanced views that Jung knew would be unacceptable to Freud, and they laid down the grounds for his future independent development as a psychoanalyst. Jung’s differences from Freud in Transformations and the Fordham lectures fall under three main headings: a desexualised view of the libido, an existential view of the causes of neurosis and a creative view of the potential of regression. He was moving away from nineteenthcentury instinct theory towards an ‘energic view-point’ modelled on the Schopenhauerian will-to-live.43 First, Jung argued, libido is ‘energy which manifests itself in the life-process and is perceived subjectively as conation and desire’.44 During the course of evolution, a portion of libido has become free from the instinctual demands of self-preservation and reproduction, and is now available for desires predicated upon more complicated adaptations to reality – desires described more accurately as aims and aspirations. It is amongst such aims and aspirations, Jung argued, that human beings find their life-tasks and challenges; and it is here that the neurotic flinches and the schizophrenic fails. Illness, he stated, occurs ‘at the moment when a new psychological adjustment, that is, a new adaptation, is demanded’.45 The causes of neurosis are thus found in the present, in the resistance, cowardice, indolence or insensibility which make people fail to adapt. Gross too emphasised the ‘pathological cowardice’ that stopped people from becoming who they were;46 and it is quite possible at this point that the mutual analysis of Jung and Gross in 1908 was beginning to bear the fruit that Freud had feared.47

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  77 Second, Freud, with what Jung called ‘his genius for the historical method’,48 sought the cause of present mental illness in past fixation; the adult neurotic was running on borrowed time, fated to fall ill when, like Paul Morel at the end of Sons and Lovers, earlier failures caught up with him. Jung approached the problem from the other side: the immediate cause of an illness was its primary cause, which then re- energised earlier infantile and childhood complexes. The infantilism seen in neurosis, he said, was the result of regressive libido which, denied present expression, flowed back into earlier complexes and reactivated them. The therapeutic task was to pursue the luckless sufferer lingering amongst the seductive temptations of regression, break their power over him (psycho-analysis) and then, by identifying the unconscious desires and aspirations which were being denied, help the newly liberated libido to accomplish its adopted life-tasks (psycho-synthesis). It was a paradigm shift away from nineteenth-century positivism towards twentiethcentury phenomenology, and it led to the kind of therapy that Gross too dreamed of, albeit stripped in Jung of its erotic formulation – a therapy in pursuit of Nietzschean self-overcoming, of what Jung would later call individuation. Third, Jung’s new psychology of self-overcoming rests on a different view of regression from that of Freud. As Laplanche and Pontalis show, Freud had only recently worked out his idea of regression through ‘the gradual discovery (1910–12) of the stages of infantile psycho-sexual development which follow each other in a predetermined order’.49 It was an order that, in neurosis, became reversed; and since, according to Frank Sulloway, the concept of regression was grounded in Haeckel’s biogenetic law that ‘ontogenesis is a brief and rapid recapitulation of phylogenesis’, 50 the adult’s regression to infantile developmental stages was also a regression to the infancy of the race. All contemporary psychoanalysis of myth was predicated on this assimilation of the child to the primitive; and yet, as Sabina Spielrein clearly spelt out to him in a letter of 1917, Jung understood this primitive regressive material quite differently from Freud: The new element you introduce is that a pathological symptom can also point towards a new pathway. This idea has been expressed in this form only by you, as far as I know. Freud did say that a neurotic symptom is at the same time an effort at curing oneself or adapting, but, if I understand him correctly – he did not mean to suggest that a symptom reveals new, valuable pathways to us, as you see it. Without its having in any way refuted Freud’s position – this would be an invaluable insight…51 Transformations and Symbols of the Libido posited, in Sonu Shamdasani’s words, ‘a phylogenetic layer to the unconscious that was still

78  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound present in everyone, consisting of mythological images’;52 and those images, rightly analysed, symbolised the struggle towards selfhood and the pathway to be followed. The study of regression in Transformations centres on the most primitive of all mythological images, that of mother and child: the father, in this attack on the father of psychoanalysis, is absent. Jung displaces the Oedipus complex as the core-complex of psychoanalysis and rewrites the theory of incest. Adult incestuous desire is not caused by past fixation but by present regression, expressing the psychological truth of a wish to return to the mother’s womb to be reborn. The introvert, weak in the face of life, retreats into infantile dependence which (psychologically speaking, if not actually) is incestuous in character. Libido flows back into newly sexualised feeling for the mother which, coming under the incest ban, flows further back still into the presexual infantile stage, where it floats free, ready to relocate itself amongst objects of cultural value. If this process succeeds, patients rise like heroes out of regression, able to contribute to cultural activity. If unsuccessful, they succumb to what Jung calls the Terrible Mother and remain infantilised. What provides patient and therapist with a pathway through such regression are the symbols found in dreams and fantasies. Symbols are more than the disguised signs of repressed desire that they were to Freud. They express unconscious parts of the self that, for better or worse, are waiting to be born and find expression. At their most creative, symbol, myth and religion constitute an unconscious language of desire and aspiration; and it was for this reason that Jung respected religion as Freud could not. It was not religious belief he valued: the need to believe was a sign of infantilism. ‘I think belief should be replaced by understanding; then we would keep the beauty of the symbol, but still remain free from the depressing results of submission to belief’.53 It was the great transformative religious symbols that he valued, which speak to people of their recurrent need for sacrifice, creation, rebirth and redemption at crucial moments of their lives. In the summer of 1914, when Lawrence held those ‘long queer discussions’ about ‘Oedipus-complexes and incest-motives’ with Eder, he surely heard of Jung’s view of incest alongside that of Freud; and this would feed into his ongoing work on ‘The Sisters’, the novel that was already becoming a history of nineteenth-century England and that would soon be transformed into a mythical history of the whole industrial age. Jung’s ideas of incest, regression and rebirth, grounded in the biogenetic law that Lawrence already knew from Haeckel, suggested a fictional way of shaping that history and of patterning the recurrent conflicts within it, whilst Jung’s sense of the transformative power of the symbol confirmed Lawrence in his search for a fictional imagery of the hopes and desires that drove that history forward. *

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  79 After the final break with Freud at the start of January 1913, Jung began four years of controlled regression and self-analysis, whilst still remaining professionally active, developing his thinking and maintaining links with people sympathetic to his new outlook, especially in Britain. He was in London in August 1913, delivering two papers exploring the desexualisation of libido announced in Transformations. The more prestigious paper was for the Seventeenth International Congress of Medicine in London; but the more interesting was given the day before the Congress opened, on 5 August, to the London Psycho-Medical Society – doubtless with Eder, a member of the Society, in the audience. Its subject was the connexion between sexuality and myth, metaphysics and religion. Freud had famously described religion in 1907 as ‘a universal obsessional neurosis’, a projection of unresolved internal conflict; but Jung, speaking in English as usual when in Britain, attacked the ‘one-sided sexual reductions of the Viennese school’. 54 It was illogical, he said, to approach dream-symbolism routinely as the disguised expression of repressed sexual desire. Why may not sexuality itself, as Gilbert Noon later argues (MN 128:3–4), sometimes symbolise something else? The man who dreams of his mother may attach a meaning to her quite different from that of incestuous desire; it may be adaptation rather than pleasure that is at stake. Especially in the later stages of analysis, Jung argued, dreaming is ‘prospective or teleological’ (221), a form of selfexpression through analogy whereby the mind tries unconsciously to grasp a new adaptation incumbent upon it. Such symbolic thinking, he thought, constituted the richness of our mental life, and should induce in the therapist a deep respect for the religious and philosophical motives of human beings, their ‘so-called metaphysical needs’ (223). The analyst should not reduce these motives to their primitive roots in sexuality, but continue the work of civilisation by supporting them. Jung returned to London the following year, in the last week of July, when Eder and Lawrence were holding their ‘queer discussions’ about ‘Oedipus-complexes and incest-motives’; again he brought two papers and again, on 24 July, he addressed the Psycho-Medical Society. His paper, ‘On Psychological Understanding’, set out his current thinking in all its fullness to an audience of followers and fellow-therapists, and, intriguingly, Lawrence may have been amongst them. Six years later, on the opening page of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, he asked with a rhetorical flourish: ‘Have we not seen and heard the ex cathedra Jung?’ The implication of this is that he himself had done so; and if Eder had indeed invited him as a guest, this would have been the first of his two opportunities. Jung’s theme was the difference between his own ‘constructive’ method and Freud’s ‘historical’ approach. Freudian psychoanalysis provided a scientific tool with which to understand the psyche in its causal history; but from another viewpoint the mind ‘is creative and can only be

80  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound comprehended synthetically or constructively’.55 To understand empathically what a person hopes to become in the future demands a different kind of scientific knowledge, which Jung called subjective or prospective. He illustrated his point by reference to an area in which Freud had confessed the inadequacies of his method: that of art. We may know all that has gone into making Faust but still not grasp its meaning. As in Transformations, Jung quoted Nietzsche’s belief that art, if meaningfully practised and understood, is an act of self-redemption for author and reader alike: ‘“Creation – this is the great redemption of suffering”’ (392). Faust, with its story of a man saved by sacrifice and hard work, was a potent redemptive symbol to Jung; it was literature, not scientific positivism, that provided the methodology for his new brand of psychoanalysis. A patient’s illness, like a work of art, must be understood not only in its causes but also its meaning. Whom do patients wish to become? What aspirations do their symptoms express in symbolic form? This is subjective science, dealing with the uniqueness of individual development; its materials do not lie in the laws of mental development but in typologies drawn from mythology, religion, literature and experience, which guide analyst and patient alike in their attempt to imagine the future self whom the patient is struggling to become. Jung concluded his lecture by reaffirming a typology of his own that he had first outlined at the 1913 Munich Psychoanalytical Congress, and that derived in part from Otto Gross’s distinction between the verflachtverbreiterte Bewusstsein and the verengt-vertiefte Bewusstsein. Jung called his two types extrovert and introvert, the former finding value in the outer and the latter in the inner world, and then, in a move that reduced Freud’s pretension to truth to the prejudice of temperament, he called Freudian psychoanalysis extrovert and that of Adler introvert. Sonu Shamdasani argues that this typology shows Jung’s awareness that the ‘personal equation’56 must be acknowledged in psychology, as it had not been by Freud and Adler. Psychological truth, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. Jung, however, refrains from discussing the typological category that delimits his own search for a scientific psychology designed to subsume the ideas of his predecessors. In all these papers of 1913–14 Jung depicts an unconscious creatively at work to appropriate the symbols of art, mythology and religion in the ceaseless struggle of the self to transform itself or, in Nietzschean phrase, to become what it is; and this was the theme of his next paper too, his keynote address to the Section of Neurology and Psychological Medicine at the BMA conference in Aberdeen on 29–31 July. Ernest Jones had written a Freudian riposte, for what would be the first public debate in Britain of the differences between Freud and Jung, but in the event he could not attend, and Eder read his reply in his absence. Jung’s lecture, ‘On the Importance of the Unconscious in Psychopathology’, was a non-technical paper about ‘mental balance’. One audience

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  81 member saw Jung’s view as ‘intrinsically opposed to Freud’s’, and Freud himself, on reading the abstract, found it ‘remarkable’ for its ‘manouevres to strike out repression’.57 Jung gave a homeostatic view of psychotherapy, showing how, with the analyst’s help, the one-sidedness of the conscious mind can be enriched by integrating the antithetical, compensatory counter-selves hidden in the patient’s unconscious. Jones’s reply dismissed Jung’s position with formalist precision as merely ‘philosophical’ and listed the contents of the unconscious as ‘repressed, conative, instinctive, infantile, unreasoning, and predominantly sexual’.58 The ensuing debate reveals much of Eder’s thinking in July 1914 when he first met Lawrence. Jones was too negative in finding the primary instincts of man ‘entirely egocentric and brutal’:59 not only are human beings driven in part by an instinct to form relationships, the moral forces that have civilised us have also originated amongst our instincts. He accepted the Freudian ideas of infantile sexuality and repression, but wished to add that the instinctual mind was also sociable and creative. The Lancet, in its report on the conference, concluded that Eder agreed with ‘the views of the unconscious advocated by Dr Jung’ rather than by Freud.60 Jones had already reached the same conclusion; on 1 July, in the same weeks as Eder’s meetings with Lawrence, he told Freud he could no longer rely on Eder, and on 10 July Freud replied: ‘What is the way, Eder’s decision for Jung will show?’61 He added that Jones was not to worry: the ‘sharp spoon’ – the scalpel – must remove ‘all the insane (unhealthy) tissue’. Eder was evidently told of this letter, for on 17 July Jones told Freud: Eder reacted badly to the “sharp spoon”, thinking it “undignified, unworthy of you, ungenerous to the valuable work done by Jung”, etc., which is a typical example of an affective judgement. His tendency is altogether towards compromise in this matter, but he sympathises with Jung on religious grounds and is in a curious anti-semitic rebellion – a muddle of personal complexes.62 Clearly Eder wanted to work with the ideas of both Freud and Jung; but like many other analysts, he was caught in a force-field that thwarted him. ‘Why can’t everyone be good?’ wailed Putnam in America;63 but neither Freud nor Jones would tolerate compromise. Three months later, perhaps even prompted by those July meetings with Lawrence, Eder made his final decision; ‘Eder hat uns verlassen’, Jones told Freud on 10 October. ‘Eder is no loss’, Freud replied with callous brevity.64 Yet even this was not the end for Eder and his wife. At the London PsychoAnalytical Society in November, they still declared that the differences between Freud and Jung were not enough to prohibit the possibility of cooperative work. Jung’s interest in ‘prospective understanding and the constructive method’, his belief in the transformative power of the great

82  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound symbols of art, myth and religion and his respect for ‘the strong aspirative power in man’, should co-exist alongside the psychoanalysis of Freud.65 In the event Eder’s ‘Jung’schen Diversion’ lasted until 1923, when he was reclaimed for Freud during a four-month analysis with Ferenczi in Budapest.66 In the war years, however, he would pioneer on behalf of Jung as actively as he had previously done for Freud. He translated over half the book that Richard Noll called ‘the seminal introduction of Jung’s work to the English-speaking world’,67 Constance Long’s edition of the Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916); he wrote an ‘Address on the Psycho-Pathology of the War Neuroses’ (1916) which, based on his war-time experiences in charge of the Psycho-Neurological Department in Malta, expounded a history of psychoanalysis that was simultaneously a founding myth of Jungian psychosynthesis;68 and, also in 1916, he wrote a remarkable review for The New Age of Beatrice Hinkle’s Psychology of the Unconscious, her translation of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido.69 In 1917 he turned his paper on the war-neuroses into a book, War-Shock, strengthening the Jungian passages as he went; and in 1918 he produced a 575-page translation of Jung’s Studies in Word-Association which he hoped would help in devising standard tests for normalcy in children. It was a remarkable body of work for a busy man in wartime, and it testifies to the depth of Eder’s sympathy for Jung. There can be no doubt that those ‘long queer discussions’ with this ‘very delightful man’ stimulated Lawrence in the autumn of 1914. The mythical histories of ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ and The Rainbow are grounded in a new view of the connexion between sexual libido and religion, and of the vicissitudes of the desexualised libido; from first to last they bear witness to Lawrence’s interest in the transformations and symbols of the libido.

III ‘A passionately religious man’: ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ (1914) Lawrence was excited by his discussions with Eder and, on 30 July, defended his poem ‘Ballad of Another Ophelia’ as written ‘according to true instinctive or dream symbolism’ (2L 203). Yet, he told Gordon Campbell, he was no Freudian: ‘The war doesn’t alter my beliefs or visions. I am not Freudian and never was – Freudianism is only a branch of medical science, interesting’ (2L 218). Those beliefs, he added, developing his own concept of ‘mental balance’, are in the impersonal ‘non-human quality of life’, with its two complementary streams of male and female, and in the need of the creative male to be fertilised by the female. What he found ‘interesting’ about psychoanalysis, however, is highlighted by the work he had just begun in September 1914 when he wrote to Campbell, his ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’.

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  83 Ostensibly literary criticism, the ‘Study’ is autobiography in the guise of religious manifesto. Lawrence himself called it ‘a sort of Story of my Heart: or a Confessio Fidei’ (2L 243), whilst Mark KinkeadWeekes invoked Nietzsche’s dictum that every great philosophy is ‘a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir’.70 In ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ Lawrence set out to write what Gross called ‘biological sociology’, a modern philosophy that would raise the unconscious ground of its own thinking into consciousness by seeking out its psychological and cultural origins. Lawrence had long thought of himself as ‘a passionately religious man’ (2L 165). In 1911 he had told his sister that he believed in ‘a vast, shimmering impulse which wavers onwards towards some end, I don’t know what – taking no regard of the little individual, but taking regard for humanity’ (1L 256); and by 1914 he was questioning the grounds of this belief, asking why such a belief was current at that time, and how had he come hold it? What provoked him into psychologising his belief, and recognising the relativity of all religions, was his reading in October 1913 of Jane Harrison’s recently published Ancient Art and Ritual, a scholarly anthropological investigation of the origins of Greek religion. Harrison argued that art and religion originated in inhibited desire: ‘Art and religion, though perhaps not wholly ritual, spring from the incomplete cycle, from unsatisfied desire, from perception and emotion that have somehow not found immediate outlet in practical action’.71 It is our ‘unaccomplished actions and desires which we call gods’, she wrote and, following Frazer, she identified those desires as those of self-preservation and sexual reproduction, or ‘food and children’ as she put it.72 Lawrence doubtless heard more of these two groups of instincts in July 1914 from Eder; and in ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ he outlined a dual instinct theory of his own, the first of many such theories he would later develop to enrich the dual instinct theory characteristic of early Freudian psychoanalysis. In the first half of the book Lawrence opposes the instinct for selfpreservation to an instinct for self-fulfilment found in all life-forms, typically in human beings in the excess of their sexual, artistic and religious life. The prodigality that Lawrence locates in human sexuality gives his argument a different cast from the cool functionalism underlying Harrison’s concern for the practicality of ritual and Freud’s concern for the biological necessity of reproduction. ‘The excess is the thing itself at its maximum of being’, Lawrence writes (STH 11). Yet such glorious culmination does not come easily, since our two sets of instincts are intrinsically in conflict with each another. Self-preservation inspires a prudent fear of the future which discourages us, individually and collectively, from launching ourselves upon the adventure of self-fulfilment. Unlike poppies which flower and die in the waste of a single glorious day, we

84  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound are cabbages picked for food before they flower. We live and work repetitively within the bounds of the known, turning our faces against the challenge of the new; self-fulfilment is frustrated, ‘the suppressed waters strain at the well-head’ (STH 32) and our ‘denied self’ (STH 17) breaks out in such catastrophes as the present war, which truly reflects the sickness of our civilisation. Lawrence applies this model of the instinctual life to Hardy’s heroes and heroines, and also to their author, who all fail to find a creative way to break free of civilised morality. They are crippled by a debilitating compliance that inhibits them from realising their individuality, and this cowardice derogates from their tragic status. As Richard Swigg shows, Lawrence deliberately ‘reframed’ Hardy’s tales to emphasise the individuality that the author was too cowardly fully to endorse.73 Jung had identified the basic human challenge as ‘How am I to be creative?’74 and this was Lawrence’s challenge too, as he fought his own battle to free das Eigene from das Fremde within himself. It was a long and painful process, a new birth involving a kind of death. Mark KinkeadWeekes has shown how this new sense of the passage through death into life shaped the revision, in July 1914, of the The Prussian Officer stories, most notably of ‘Daughters of the Vicar’ where Louise’s cowardly self undergoes ‘a kind of death’ before being reborn in love (PO, 82). This metaphor of rebirth, traditionally Christian as it is, was not new to Lawrence’s writing in 1914; he had already told Henry Savage in December 1913 that what a man wants of a woman is to be ‘re-born, re-constructed’ (2L 115). But the metaphor is not only Christian. It is also a Nietzschean metaphor of self-transformation, and a defining image in Jung’s Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, central to its reconceptualisation of incestuous desire. It would also soon become a central image in The Rainbow, where rebirth through sexual love brings a ‘religious’ or ‘eternal’ sense of the fulness of life redeemed from the ordinary incompleteness of desire. Such fulfilment, however, is only momentary at best and inaccessible to many people, and it is out of their ensuing dissatisfaction that they create their religious beliefs. This idea, shared by Jane Harrison, was so widely held at the time that William James made space to attack it as impertinent ‘medical materialism’ in the first chapter of his Varieties of Religious Experience;75 but Lawrence had no such qualms. ‘What is offered to God in all time is largely unsatisfied sex’ (2L 101), he told Henry Savage in 1913, and the ‘Study’ elaborates his claim: since no man and no woman can get a perfect mate, nor obtain complete satisfaction at all times, each man according to his need must have a God, an idea, that shall compel him to the movement of his own being. (STH 57)

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  85 It was an argument that engaged directly with one of the issues that divided Freud and Jung: the nature of the relationship between sexuality and religion. Freud saw religion as tantamount to a neurosis, resulting from ‘the suppression, the renunciation, of certain instinctual impulses’.76 Jung, by contrast, thought religion something sui generis, the work of sexual libido liberated from sexual desire and made available for cultural pursuits; it speaks with the symbolic language of the unconscious and helps us become who we are. Lawrence picked his own way between these two positions. Like Freud, he saw religion as the expression of unsatisfied (though not necessarily neurotic) sexuality, and like Jung, he saw it as a search for ‘mental balance’ pursued by individuals and races alike. The second half of the ‘Study’ explores the history of this search through an extraordinary myth of bisexuality that anticipates Jung’s post-war ideas of anima and animus. * It is not clear when Lawrence first began to think seriously about bisexuality. Perhaps it was with Helen Corke, who said that Carpenter’s Love’s Coming-of-Age had helped her to clarify her own sexuality around 1911, during the period of her intense friendship with Lawrence. Carpenter enabled her to think of sexual identity ‘in terms of the colour band of the spectrum’, to picture herself on ‘neutral ground’, ‘at the half-way house, partaking of both masculine and feminine sex values’.77 She did not speak directly of bisexuality, and neither did Love’s Coming- of-Age; but it was a concept – situated at the interface of biology, psychology and cultural history – that had been increasingly accepted since the 1880s. Freud approached bisexuality as both a biologist and a psychologist and, according to Frank Sulloway, ‘it was this dual construction to his theorising as a sexologist that has made so enduring Freud’s thinking as a psychoanalyst’.78 Bisexuality is the consequence of nature and nurture; it has an organic base in our constitution, and a psychic base in our early development as children brought up as one sex in a world containing two sexes. Sexual identity is shaped by both biology and identification; and each category, and the tension between them, underlines the lability of sexual desire. ‘In all of us, throughout life’, Freud wrote, ‘the libido normally oscillates between male and female objects’.79 Lawrence, like Freud, understood this both from his own experience and from his reading; but characteristically he traced the origins of such lability to cultural and familial factors perverting the universal polarised gender stereotypes of biology. Psychic bisexuality was the betrayal of biology by history; and whilst his awareness of cultural history was a strength, his opposition between nature and nurture rested on an idealisation of the body that diminished the role of culture in naturalising sexual identity.

86  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound Lawrence first wrote about gender in January 1913, in his ‘Foreword’ to Sons and Lovers. The novel’s success lies in its depiction of the power of familial and cultural history to determine the sexual identity of its central characters; but the ‘Foreword’ proposes a different, universal view of gender. Like Nietzsche, Ibsen and Hardy before him, Lawrence celebrates the pagan joy and livsglaede lost to a repressive Christian civilisation, and his ‘Foreword’ remythologises Judeo-Christian theology in order to contrast Jewish joy in the life of the flesh with the asceticism of Christian dedication to the life of the soul. God the Father, said Lawrence, is the flesh, the physicality of the matter from which the world is made, embodying the Law of the individual creature pressing towards self-fulfilment; Christ is the Word, the spirit born of the flesh, representing the self-sacrificial Love that presses towards the good of the community. God the Father is identified with Woman, the creator of the material world who embodies Law and the morality of Nature, whilst Christ the Son is identified with Man, the creator of ideas who embodies Love and civilised morality. It is a myth that, whilst challenging some patriarchal assumptions of priority, reinforces others: woman, for instance, is imaged in traditional patriarchal terms as the creative still centre, the hearth and home, from whom man, the doer, ventures forth in the morning to work, and to whom he returns at night. The purpose of these stereotypes is to emphasise how, typically of the modern world, gender roles in the Morel family are reversed. The natural order succumbs to a confusion which produces the new ‘son-lover’, the modern Oedipus, ‘legion’ today. Paul’s masculinity is betrayed by his family history into homosexual feelings for Baxter Dawes, akin to those that Lawrence was beginning to admit in himself. When he wrote in 1913 that ‘nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality’, preferring the body of a man to that of a woman (2L 115), he was describing the desire of the unsatisfied male to identify himself with an otherwise unattainable masculinity. Hence James Cowan’s description of Lawrence’s homoeroticism as the expression of a need for ‘male nurturance’ caused by the childhood absence of his father, rather than as an ‘object-instinctive’ homosexual drive.80 In 1913–14 Lawrence conceptualised homosexuality in narcissistic terms as an instinctive desire for self-fulfilment in one’s own sex at the expense of the other: it confounded the instincts of self-preservation and sexuality that should ideally be balanced in creative opposition. The prophetic, quasi-biblical style of Lawrence’s ‘Foreword’ was a typical recourse of modernism in its recurrent attempts to find meaning in a world of lost certainty; and it implies that all such meanings are generated, as in the Bible, by myth. Lawrence’s account of God the Father and Christ the Son is one such myth; but what of his view of gender? Is this a belief about human biology, or a mythical vision of an imagined world designed to bring order to the unending miseries of history? In

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  87 ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’, written 18 months later, the issue is clearer, the schema more complex, and newly historicised. The ‘Study’ speaks not only of man and woman but of male and female, and declares that ‘division into male and female is arbitrary, for the purpose of thought’ (STH 60). What Lawrence is explicitly developing is a modernist myth as Michael Bell defines it, a comprehensive narrative that enables him ‘to inhabit as conviction a world view which is also known to be ultimately relative’.81 It is what the post-Nietzschean philosopher Hans Vaihinger called an ‘As If’ fiction, enabling the practical business of thinking and acting in a noumenal world. Vaihinger was widely read at the time, not least by Eder who, in 1913, had described Adler’s belief that the neurotic lived an ‘As If’ life in ‘a world of fiction’.82 The phrase would have attracted Lawrence, not only as an account of neurosis but, as Vaihinger intended, of normal living. It was the job of artists and philosophers to generate fictions that offered provisional readings of the world, and in the second half of his ‘Study’ Lawrence offered such a model of gender, grounded in a new and more positive way of treating bisexuality. Whilst the first half of the ‘Study’ distinguished the self-preservation instinct from the sexual instinct, and traced the origins of religion to ‘unsatisfied sex’, the second half explains this displacement of desire in terms of bisexuality. There are male and female elements in everyone, Lawrence says; the ‘male’ is associated with doing, seeking out the otherness of the outside world, whilst the ‘female’ is associated with being, absorbing the otherness of the outside world into itself. Male and female are always differently mixed, because of our individual nature and our ever-changing historical and geographical context. Lawrence outlines a history of civilisation driven by an unending search of the male element for the female and the female element for the male – a search which, when thwarted, is diverted into religion and art. ‘The human effort’, he wrote, is ‘always to recover balance, to symbolise and so to possess that which is missing. Which is the religious effort of Man’ (STH 59). Christ, for instance, is ‘the suppressed male spirit of Judea’ (STH 63), evoked out of the unconscious desire of a feminine race, and he is evoked through symbolism which is the one true language of desire. It is the work of the Holy Ghost, Lawrence adds, to synthesise Father and Son, Female and Male, Flesh and Spirit, Law and Love, thus healing the oedipal crisis of contemporary life and righting what Sons and Lovers called its ‘toppling balance’. * The ‘Study’ appropriates themes widespread in contemporary culture but which psychoanalysis alone had focussed within the framework of a single discipline; it could not have been written without the benefit of those ‘long queer discussions’ with Eder. Lawrence used a dual instinct

88  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound theory to highlight the pre-eminence of the sexual instinct; he traced the religious impulse to unsatisfied sexual desire; he deployed the concepts of bisexuality and mental balance to identify the ever-changing content of that desire; he analysed religion and art as expressions of that desire as it exists in both the individual and racial unconscious; and he isolated the symbol as the means whereby that desire is apprehended and made accessible to consciousness. It was a constellation of beliefs that helped him to fight his way out of the tragic impasse in which his own earlier fiction, like that of Hardy, had been stuck; and his later idea of what Anne Fernihough calls the ‘organic polysemy’83 of the symbol originates here in his belief that the symbol is the language of desire, not knowledge – of the future, not the past. It is not the bearer but the maker of meaning; it is that which makes new meanings possible. This view of symbolism comes very close to that of Eder and Jung, as Eder’s 1916 review of the newly translated Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido shows, when he gives eloquent expression to Jung’s belief that symbolism is our means of passing from the known past to the unknown future: In so far as to-morrow will be like to-day, and it will be so in regard to a large number of mental processes, man is served by his experiences; but to man is given the gift not only of creating something in the morrow which is quite unlike to-day, dissimilar from his experiences, but also of foreshadowing that new creation. That forecast of the new he relates to his known experiences by means of symbols.84 Symbols change only slightly, Eder continues, but their content changes continuously as civilisations evolve. There comes a time when old creeds lose their credibility; and when that time comes, we should not discard them but infuse them with new life, revitalise their symbolism. This is our responsibility as human beings, to ‘pay heed to the new springs of life that come welling up from the perpetual fount within’: Jung’s great work points out to us, indeed, the dying gods; his great understanding of the human psyche would help to find new ways of life, to replace the dying with the nascent faith, to make the transition less painful and destructive; harmless it cannot be: witness the great war. These were words of 1916, written with retrospective clarity about the Jung of 1912; but the beliefs they celebrate – in a creative unconscious, the destructiveness inherent in creation, the visionary power of the symbol and the continuous need to regenerate the common stock of symbolism – chime with the ideas that Lawrence developed in the summer and autumn of 1914 in discussion with Eder.

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  89 They are ideas, moreover, that fed into his revision of the novel that he had come to England to publish – the novel once entitled ‘The Wedding Ring’ but renamed in May 1914 The Rainbow. As with Sons and Lovers, this final revision was forced on Lawrence by his publishers, Methuen, who had returned his manuscript on 10 August, immediately after the declaration of war, probably in a general moratorium on all their publishing activities. This setback, with its financial implications, contributed to the ‘sheer rage’ against the war that provoked the ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ (2L 212). But once the ‘Study’ was finished, Lawrence returned to The Rainbow and, as with Sons and Lovers, rewrote it from the beginning. History was repeating itself: the need to rewrite Sons and Lovers had been provoked in part by his discussions with Frieda about psychoanalysis, and now his discussions with Eder, alongside his work on the ‘Study’, helped stimulate his desire to rewrite The Rainbow.

IV The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound It is hard to assess what Charles Ross calls the ‘creative distance’ between The Rainbow and ‘The Wedding Ring’ since so little of the latter survives;85 but as the published novel is around twice the length of its predecessor, the rewriting of November 1914–March 1915 was clearly a major act of revision. Some sections are known to be new,86 and Lawrence himself felt that the book showed ‘a new sort of me’ (2L 255) – not least, we might say, in its approach to psychoanalysis. In a review of 1915, J.C. Squire supposed its author ‘under the spell of German psychologists’.87 But Lawrence was ‘not Freudian and never was’; neither his new friendship with Eder nor his established relationship with Frieda deflected him from his own faith in ‘the tremendous non-human quality of life’ that sprang from the fertilisation of male and female within the same mind (2L 218). The ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ found the origins of this belief in the interplay between cultural history, sexual fulfilment and religious need; and The Rainbow approaches psychoanalysis in the same relativistic spirit – as part of the cultural history that it traces, an expression of its historical moment, contributing to the understanding necessary for its surpassing. Mark Kinkead-Weekes has illustrated the ‘densely “historical”’ nature of the imagination at work in The Rainbow;88 yet, for all its awareness of time and place, it is Lawrence’s neo-Hegeleian interest in the development of human consciousness that takes precedence. It is the open-ended creative process of life that he dramatises, as succeeding generations struggle with increasing difficulty to achieve mental balance in their living. Increasingly in a Christian industrial civilisation, as Ursula comes to recognise, the mind has become split, with the world of consciousness only a small ‘circle lighted by a lamp’ and, beyond it in ‘the outer

90  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound darkness’ (R 405), all the undomesticated forces of the unconscious. This discovery of the unconscious places her amongst the pioneers of her culture, and her final faith in its creativity embodies Lawrence’s own search for balance with the repressed unconscious discovered by psychoanalysis. Like the ‘Study’ The Rainbow too is a ‘Confessio Fidei’ that confesses the ground of its own coming into being. The events of the novel take place beneath the ‘empty sky’ of its second paragraph; there is no religious or metaphysical creed, no moral or psychological belief to provide an Archimedean pivot for the novel. What sustains it is a religious myth; historical events take their meaning from its mythical frame. When in 1914 Jung revised his July address to the Psycho-Medical Society, he declared it ‘an obstinate, scholastic misunderstanding not to be able to distinguish between a world-philosophy (Weltanschauung) which is only psychological, and an extra-psychological theory, which concerns the objective thing’.89 In both his ‘Study’ and The Rainbow, Lawrence developed a view of history that was ‘psychological’ in this sense, resting on the personal equation, the subjective involvement of the observer. Like the psychoanalysts, and like Jane Harrison, he believed that the deepest truths revealed by myth were truths about human desire; but they were truths that changed as the world changed. Since 1908 psychoanalysis had seen itself as the key to all mythologies; but for Lawrence mythology provided the key to all psychologies. Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, as Eder knew, interprets myth in terms of the vicissitudes of libido vacillating between a temptation to regress into infantile dependence on the mother and selftransformation by means of heroic self-sacrifice. Lawrence would have had no truck with self-sacrifice; but in The Rainbow he reconceptualises Freudian oedipal theory to accommodate the Nietzschean belief, shared by both Gross and Jung, in self-overcoming. He structures the book according to his belief that the important struggle in each individual is between the desire to regress and the urge to make a new adaptation, with the child of each generation fighting against oedipal attachment to its parents in order to surpass them and achieve individual autonomy and balance. Always there is the atavistic desire to turn back, to repeat the parental solution; ontogeny must recapitulate phylogeny before the self can come into its own. As Eder noted, summarising Jung’s differences from Freud, ‘it is easier to go back to the old paths than to go forward to new unexplored ground’;90 but this desire to return to the safety of the known must be overcome in order to adventure on the unknown future which, in Eder’s words again, is related to the known ‘by means of symbols’.91 This is the struggle dramatised in the narrative myth of The Rainbow. *

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  91 As in Genesis, the opening pages of The Rainbow establish the myth that gives meaning to what follows, announcing the fall from paradisal plenitude that it is the work of history to regain in greater fulness. Their ultimate aim, to quote Eder again, is to ‘replace the dying with the nascent faith’, to replace an outdated Christian myth with an imaginative fiction more attuned to early modern individualism. It is no longer paradise that is lost but a pre-industrial organic community where, in nostalgic retrospect, sexuality, religion and labour seem to have been harmoniously interwoven with the seasonable rhythms of the natural world. Marcel Mauss called such a community a ‘total society’, where ‘each phenomenon contains all the threads of which the social fabric is composed’.92 Lawrence does not claim such a community ever existed in nineteenth-century Nottinghamshire; we are dealing not with history but with poetry, with the landscape of desire. Lawrence’s celebration of the pre-industrial generations of the Brangwen family offers what Malinowski might have called a ‘mythical charter’ of modernity, prompting readers to recognise the yearnings at the heart of their alienation and then to develop their own compensatory symbolism – to ‘spin a web out of their own bowels’, as Yeats put it.93 As in saga or epic, the narrative emerges out of mythical prehistory, in pursuit of a religious vision adequate to the hunger created by modern life. Lawrence’s understanding of myth is closer to Jung than to the anthropologists, as he imagines the victories and perils of the heroic soul in its quest for self-fulfilment. There are three axes along which people search for fulfilment in the book: the geographical axis (the distances to which they travel), the spiritual axis (the heights to which they aspire) and the temporal axis (the past, present or future to which they look). The first two of these are symbolised by the flat plains and the spire of the little church in the opening sentences, whilst the third is determined by the characters’ vacillations between the spiritual perils of regressive nostalgia and the hopefulness of desire. Lawrence himself is clear; as G.M. Hyde says, ‘one of the wonders of Lawrence’s The Rainbow is the strength of the principle of hope that keeps its author out of Proust’s cork-lined room of obsessive retrospection’.94 As in the Bible, it is the woman’s desire for experience that causes the ‘fall’; her desire, however, is not an unnatural rebellion against God but a natural reaction to patriarchal power. Like ‘The Sisters’, The Rainbow hopes to show ‘woman becoming individual, self-responsible, taking her own initiative’ (2L 165), together with her failures when acting as though she were a man. The Brangwen women’s desire for self-fulfilment structures their religious outlook differently from the men. It is enough for the men that, looking up casually from work in the fields, they see a church-tower against the empty sky. They lift their heads only rarely, in those lapses of imaginative absorption in the immediacy of life which, according to Lawrence’s ‘Study’, are the origins of religious  desire.

92  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound At such moments the church gives height to their aspiration and depth to their feeling; its master-narrative and rites de passage prove sufficient to those life-crises – birth, marriage, death – which form the novel’s main focus. The life of the spirit matters little to them: they invest most of their religious life in their women, who symbolise ‘that further life which comprised religion and love and morality’ (R 20). The women, however, are less interested in religion than in the vicar and curate, both of whom ‘spoke the other, magic language, and had the other, finer bearing’ (R 11). It is through this personal interest that the women – or, more accurately, the female element in men and women alike – first evolve into individuality, separated from the tribe. Dissatisfied with the range of their husbands, they invest the ‘beyond’ of their faith in the gentry and clergy, and paradoxically the new range they seek will increase their social alienation. * In a letter to Jung of September 1911, relieved after reading the first part of Transformations, Freud had rejoiced in their agreement over infantile sexuality, that ‘the Oedipus complex is at the root of religious feeling’.95 But in the second part Jung demurred, tracing incestuous desire to regressive adult attachment to the mother; and this heterodoxy, striking to the heart of psychoanalysis, led Freud to end Totem and Taboo (1913) with his dogmatic assertion that ‘the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus Complex’.96 The Rainbow, with a different sense of history, places the Oedipus complex at the beginnings of religious feeling in the modern world. It locates the drive towards individual and social transformation in the exogenous oedipal feelings generated in children by dissatisfied parents; typically, in tracing religious feeling to oedipal disturbance, it follows Gross rather than Freud or Jung in focussing less upon mothers and sons than upon fathers and daughters, and the increasingly pathogenic nature of patriarchal society in the nineteenth century. It begins, however, with mothers and sons, and the female element in Tom Brangwen. Tom is the first Brangwen to achieve differentiation in Lawrence’s text, as a result of the oedipal configuration of his sensibility. The new depths and difficulties in his erotic life arise because he was his mother’s favourite in childhood, sent to school to fulfil her ambition that he enter the richer world of learning. This alienates him from his community, disturbs his confidence as a man and inaugurates the long nineteenth-century history of gender reversal in the novel. Instead of the straightforward polarised relationship between the sexes enjoyed by his ancestors, Tom Brangwen has a feminine aspect that problematises his sexuality. Because his imaginative life is ‘rooted in his mother and his sister’ (R 20), his relationships with women alternate between idealisation

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  93 and disillusion, in a rhythm that will later plague his descendants too.97 His desire is sharpened, spiritualised and deflected into a religious longing that increases his self-consciousness. What interests Lawrence is not Freudian incestuous desire, father-son rivalry or the incest-ban diverting libido into the work of civilisation; it is the relationship between mother and son that Jung had explored in Transformations, splitting the son between the desire to regress and the desire for self-fulfilment. Alfred Kuttner told Methuen in his reader’s report on ‘The Wedding Ring’ that the characters’ psychology was ‘almost literally transferred’ from Sons and Lovers (R 483); but in identifying the continuities in Lawrence’s writing, he missed the differences. For in The Rainbow Lawrence unbound his own version of the Oedipus complex from the tragic configuration hitherto dominant in his work and made it, no less decisively than Freud, the driving force of cultural evolution. Lawrence believed this oedipal dynamic originated when the sexually charged ‘stream of life’ (R 79) that belongs properly to married life is diverted towards the child, rousing it to premature self-consciousness, intensifying its capacity both for desire and regression, energising and inhibiting it at the same time. Tom’s mother transfers her dissatisfaction with her husband to her son in this way as, in a process that becomes increasingly fraught over the generations, Tom will later transfer his own dissatisfaction with his wife to his step-daughter. As a child Tom ‘had loved his mother’ (R 22), and the inhibition of this love had created in him a religious longing that drove him steadily deeper into life. There are moments of regression too, when he harks back nostalgically to the past. In a habit that will eventually prove his undoing, he turns to alcohol, occasionally drinking himself into a stupor in order to feel ‘at one with all the world’ (R 28). This is a regression, a betrayal of ‘his own individuality’ in the search for a womb-like warmth where he feels ‘united with all flesh in a hot blood-relationship’ (R 28), like that enjoyed by his forefathers. But mostly Tom stands by his naïve religious faith in ‘the wonder of the beyond’ (R 13), and it is this that saves him from bitterness and depression. The beyond, however, is further off for him than for his predecessors. His need ‘to find in a woman the embodiment of all his inarticulate, powerful religious impulses’ (R 21) gives sexual love a primacy and exclusivity unknown to his ancestors. Where they had seen in woman the embodiment of religion, love and morality, Tom’s feeling for woman is itself religious. A new sense of individuality is accompanied by the increasing importance of personal relationships. Tom’s sexuality, however, is unsettled by uncertainty about his manliness. Like Paul Morel, Tom Brangwen is at first one of those men of whom Freud wrote: ‘where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love’.98 In the presence of a ‘nice girl’ Tom is psychically impotent (R 21), and though women attract him, he is also drawn with the female part of himself

94  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound towards men who possess the fineness of education and good breeding that his mother has taught him to value. In episodes that foreshadow the relationship between Ursula and Winifred, he finds such fineness first in a schoolboy friend and, later on, in a middle-aged foreigner whom he meets at an inn. This passing expression of his homosexual component perhaps expresses the narcissistic need to make himself worthy of his mother’s love.99 Despite Tom’s unease about his manliness, however, it is basically secure, and most of his dissatisfaction is deflected into his religious belief. He has little interest in conventional Christianity; the deity that occupies his empty sky is made in the image of the lack that haunts him, and helps to restore, in Jung’s phrase, his ‘mental balance’. He believes in what Lawrence’s ‘Study’ calls a female God, an unknown Creator who sustains the goings-on of the natural world from which he himself feels alienated; ‘fragmentary, something incomplete and subject’, he nevertheless submits to ‘the greater ordering’ (R 40). His feelings and his faith originate in the oedipal frustrations of his childhood and, later on, in the sexual dissatisfactions of his manhood; and when finally he finds the woman of his choice, his faith in her is sustained by its religious quality. On balance his marriage proves happy. It is also incomplete; for his wish for the beyond leads him to fall in love with a foreign woman whom he can never fully know. Neither sexual fulfilment in marriage nor spiritual fulfilment in faith can wholly make up for his failure to achieve the intellectual, conscious life that his mother desired for him. The long fall into modernity has begun, bringing enriched affection and deeper alienation in its wake. * Tom finds ‘transformation’ through his relationship with Lydia (R 32), but only in moments – eternal, Lawrence calls them – that are also evanescent: brief moments of epiphany within an endless cycle of gain and loss that are nevertheless the measure of fulfilment. One such moment occurs at the end of Chapter II, with the whole family in crisis: Lydia in labour, Tom anxious, and Anna, Lydia’s child by her first marriage, jealous. Like Little Father Time in Jude the Obscure, Anna is the ‘nodal point’ of the combined misery of two marriages,100 and the imminent birth of a potential rival reawakens the insecurity first caused in infancy by her mother’s depression and later compounded by her re-marriage. Anna wants her mother and, regressing into the omnipotence of childish despair, cries inconsolably for her. Confronted with the fixity of the child’s grief, Tom is overwhelmed and, regressing too, sinks briefly into torpor. Then he pulls himself together and, with fine intuitive empathy, takes Anna out into the rainy night where ‘a new being was created in her for the new conditions’ (R 75). It is a moment of rebirth. Gradually

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  95 her grief relaxes, and Tom can also then relax, sinking for the second time that night – but happily now – into ‘the old irresponsibility and security’ of his boyhood (R 76). This is the benign regression of Transformations, a rebirth for him too, enabling him once again to face the present. Tenderly he puts Anna to bed and, gathering his courage, goes to see his wife, only to find communication still difficult between them. There is a moment of impersonal recognition, but Tom’s desire for personal contact is first baulked and then deflected into a religious communion with the ‘infinite world’ that transcends them both (R 77). The strains that have developed throughout the chapter finally ease here at its end, in an episode that epitomises the enterprise of the whole novel; and yet they will recur. Lawrence sees clearly the paradox that baffles the search for selffulfilment – that fulfilment entails relationship, but that relationship entails conflict, both within the self and with the other. Indeed, in the early Modernist period, self and other were often consigned to different moral and linguistic worlds. Ibsen called one of his plays Emperor and Galilean to highlight the incompatibility of the imperious ‘pagan’ demands of the self with the ‘Christian’ ideal of self-sacrificial love for the other. It is Lydia in The Rainbow who, with devastating simplicity, outlines the problem, in reply to the young Ursula’s questions about her destiny in love: Yes, some man will love you, child, because it’s your nature, And I hope it will be somebody who will love you for what you are, and not for what he wants of you. But we have a right to what we want. (R 241) Ursula’s reaction to her grandmother’s words is to cling closely to her, in an act of regression that shrinks away from the challenging otherness of the outside world. But it is Lydia too, with her continental habits of thinking, who indicates the solution: ‘“Between two people, the love itself is the important thing, and that is neither you nor him. It is a third thing you must create. You mustn’t expect it to be just your way”’ (R 163). For the first time Lawrence here invokes the concept of das Dritte, the ‘third thing’ of relationship that was so central to Otto Gross’s thinking. Gross’s dialectical language of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, rooted in German intellectual tradition, appealed to Lawrence because it drew attention to the relational aspect of human interaction. It was an insight that only bore fruit in psychoanalysis much later, in the work of the British ‘object-relations’ school, with their recognition that all important human living takes place by means of symbolisation in a transitional ‘third area’ between subject and object. It must have been in conversation with Frieda and her family that Lawrence first heard of

96  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound das Dritte, perhaps Gross’s most important revision of the Nietzsche in whom, as Anne Fernihough says, ‘“otherness” has been eliminated’.101 When Gross wrote in 1913 that relationship, considered as a sacred third thing between people, subsumes the instinctual drive towards individualisation (Die Beziehung, als Drittes, als Religion genommen, enthält den Zwang zur Individualisierung),102 he was expressing the same belief expressed in The Rainbow, that self-fulfilment can only be realised through the holiness of relationship and sexual love. It is a religious lesson that Ursula repeats to herself at the end of the book: ‘Who was she to have a man according to her own desire? It was not for her to create, but to recognise a man created by God’ (R 457). A child too is a ‘third thing’ created between two people ‘by God’, and must be granted its otherness, free from the ideal bullying demands of dissatisfied parents. Peter Balbert has written well on childbirth as metaphor in The Rainbow, emphasising Lawrence’s belief that life always tries to surpass itself, and that the pangs of rebirth are ‘a primary condition of life’.103 Creativity and destructiveness are implicit in each other, as the tearing pains of new life are visited upon the old. But Balbert also sees that Lawrence’s interest in the metaphor of childbirth is grounded in an awareness of real family-life, as parents struggle to bring a child into being and the child struggles to surpass them. In Transformations, illustrating the ‘destroying quality of the creative power’, Jung had already celebrated ‘the dangerous battle of life’ where the new is the enemy of the old, and every new birth is simultaneously a death: ‘To be fruitful means, indeed, to destroy one’s self, because with the rise of the succeeding generation the previous one has passed beyond its highest point’.104 It is the parents’ responsibility to allow this new ‘third thing’ of a child to surpass them, free from oedipal distortion. In The Rainbow it is a responsibility that succeeding generations increasingly fail to meet. * Tom turns to his step-daughter Anna in compensation for the diminution in his wife’s love during pregnancy, and they become ‘like lovers, father and child’ (R 62). It is, Balbert says, a ‘dangerously sympathetic’ relationship.105 Anxious since infancy because of Lydia’s depression, Anna now finds herself, in Carol Sklenicka’s words, ‘emotionally and sexually formed’ by her oedipal attachment to Tom.106 This creates a narcissistic sense of her own specialness, a defensive sense of omnipotence, seen at its frailest in the episode with the geese and its most imperious with the cretinous Nat. Once again the bullying exercise of power acts as compensation for the insufficiency of love. In adolescence she cleaves still more closely to her father who seems ‘a kind of Godhead’, embracing ‘all manhood’ (R 100). The silent strength of his marriage to Lydia, however,

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  97 baulks her and makes her look elsewhere for satisfaction, and so begins her adolescent search for religious belief. She turns to the church, then to reading; but always the externality of the written word seems false to her inner feeling. Nor can her female friends help her; and it is now that she meets and falls in love with Will Brangwen. But her courtship and subsequent marriage only confirm her sense of herself, they cannot transform it; for Will, like her father, is an inarticulate man who resists drawing things into consciousness. As Lawrence puts it, he cannot ‘lead her’ forward into new areas of belief where she can find corroboration (R 181), and so her marriage is only a partial success. Her soul finds ‘no utterance’ (R 192); her chief comfort remains her narcissistic sense of her own potency and fecundity as a woman, exercised in hostility to the man who has disappointed her. Anna’s faith is in ‘the omnipotence of the human mind’ (R 161), a typical mid-Victorian humanism fuelled by the omnipotence of her childhood fantasies and a religious belief in the ‘beyond’ of her own womanly self. ‘Indeed’, Lawrence tells us, ‘her soul and her own self were one and the same in her’ (R 148). With motherhood she relinquishes the challenge to extend her faith beyond herself; her dance, like David’s dance before the ‘female’ God of Judaism described in the ‘Study’, is to ‘the unseen Creator who had chosen her’ (R 170). It is a ‘nullification’ of her husband and the masculine otherness that he fails to embody for her. In her marriage and the ‘matriarchy’ of her home she feels herself a Magna Mater, ‘like the earth, the mother of everything’ (R 193). What she relishes spiritually, she also relishes sensually when, following Will’s encounter with the girl from Nottingham, she begins to explore her own sexuality. ‘He was the sensual male seeking his pleasure, she was the female ready to take hers’ (R 218). Always it is the heightening of her own experience as a woman that she seeks, and persistently, as when they visit Lincoln Cathedral, she resists the reality of her husband’s world. Within her mocking humanism lies the latent spirit of the feminism that will later manifest itself in her daughters; for though no feminist herself, Anna is living out the historical conditions necessary for its development, with its demand for women to achieve their full potential. Where Anna inherits and carries forward the Brangwen women’s wish for wider knowledge and deeper self-consciousness, Will is inarticulate and withdrawn, condemned to seek a regressive, vicarious expression in the arts and architecture of mediaeval Christianity. ‘They were opposites, not complements’ (R 157), Anna discovers; and her language suggests how far Lawrence has developed Gross’s sense of the dialectical nature of human relationships – far beyond anything in Gross himself. To speak of the ‘third thing’ allowed Lawrence to honour conflict between people. It need not be feared as destructive or appeased with self-sacrifice; it can be the principle by which a relationship is deepened. Tom and Lydia had been complements rather than opposites, and their

98  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound conflicts were creative rather than destructive. The contrary is true of Will and Anna; the ‘third thing’ they create is frail at best, and so their marriage becomes tainted by the sado-masochistic envy, hatred and bullying of people who feel uncreative in their living. With no future to believe in, Will turns to the past; his position in the novel’s historical scheme is biologically atavistic, culturally reactionary and psychologically regressive. Through him, Lawrence passes judgement on the neo-Gothic revival which was one response, reactionary more than progressive, to the mid-century crises in religion, politics and science. But Will’s religion, like that of everyone in the novel, derives from ‘unsatisfied sex’, from a masculinity in even greater crisis now than it had been for Tom: the emergence of women as powerful beings in their own right has been unsettling. From the start Will feels inferior to Anna, and the sign of his insecurity is his inability to complete his carving of Adam and Eve. It is a failure of creative belief and vision: he cannot picture a harmonious relationship between man and woman. He cannot do what the novel does and create a new mythical charter, authorising his own conception of life by pouring new life into old symbols, and his best efforts to imagine a woman issuing forth from Adam’s side are belied by the fact that in real life he depends on Anna as ‘a child on its mother’ (R 176). Writing like an evolutionary biologist, Lawrence says of Will that there were ‘buds which were not ripe in him, some folded centres of darkness which would never develop and unfold’ (R 195), and the metaphor suggests a physiological failure beneath his psychological incapacity. Something has dammed the stream of his life and diverted it into religious pleasures, provoking a secret shame more usually associated with sexual perversity. His entrance into the ‘perfect womb’ of Lincoln Cathedral (R 186) is incestuous in the Jungian sense: it is the sexualised spiritual pleasure of an adult in a state of regression. Will is one of those men whom the ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ describes as seeking ‘communion with his God apart and averse from the woman’ (STH 57). Inhibited in love, and overborne by Anna, he responds in kind by setting out to maximise his own pleasures as a male. First, he attempts to seduce a young girl in Nottingham whom, with almost Jacobean relish, he ‘wanted to absorb’ into himself (R 213); then, returning home, he accosts his wife with the force of a ‘marauder’ (R 218). Will’s imbalance, his disintegration, is greater than that of Tom; he cannot unite body and soul, or harmonise his religious faith with the dissatisfied life out of which it springs. He tries to hide from his dissatisfaction in the variety of his interests, ‘his wife, his child, the church, the wood-work, and his wage-earning, all occupying him’ (R 194); but his efforts are forlorn, and his eldest daughter Ursula will pay a heavy price for his failure when he turns to her with a passionate protectiveness that, like Mr Massey’s paternal care in ‘Daughters of the Vicar’, is mostly self-defence.

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  99

V The Creative Illness of Ursula Brangwen From earliest infancy Ursula is constrained by her father’s immaturity. His own suffering prevents him from perceiving her otherness so that, when she cries, it is no metaphor but plain truth that he hears ‘his own flesh and blood crying!’ (R 196). He longs for her to corroborate him in his social role as father, and quickly Ursula complies. ‘It knew its mother better, it wanted its mother more. But the brightest, sharpest little ecstasy was for the father’ (R 197). Lawrence would later locate such ecstasy in what he called the ‘cardiac plexus’; it is a spiritual climax not unlike Winnicott’s ‘ego orgasm’,107 and it establishes Ursula’s oedipal imbalance by confounding the sensual and spiritual in ways that continue to plague her. Too soon the call had come to her, when she was a small baby, and her father held her close to his breast, her sleep-living heart was beaten into wakefulness by the striving of his bigger heart, by his clasping her to his body for love and for fulfilment. (R 205) Will’s adult call upon his daughter leaves her both excited and tainted with a ‘dim, childish sense of her own smallness and inadequacy’ (R 205). A bitterness grows between them that will surface later in her ecstasies with Skrebensky. Yet although her oedipal situation is damaging, it also provokes a restless transformative desire that drives her forward into life in search of happiness. Like her parents, though more urgently, Ursula will use power to compel the happiness she cannot find. Ursula’s difficulties are compounded by Will’s rages against her. Blind to the independence of her existence, he punishes her because she does not provide a mirror in which he can see himself reflected without flaw. Unconsciously sensing his own insecurity and the instability of their relationship, he is driven to test her, committing acts that are abusive, even sadistic, as when he tries to frighten her by jumping off a canal bridge with her clinging to his back. Faced for the first time with the bullying of the patriarchal world, Ursula ‘became hard, cut herself off from all connection, lived in the little separate world of her own violent will’ (R 208). The characteristic pattern of her mental life is established, as she develops a narcissistic, paranoid attitude that saves her from guilt and gives her formidable power, but that will later damage her capacity to form adult relationships. In her defensive withdrawal she takes refuge in a fantasy life finely balanced between the debilitating and the creative; and Lawrence, uniquely in this novel, uses the language of illusion and disillusion to explore the preciousness and precariousness of that life. In a pattern that re-enacts the rhythm of her childhood relationship with her father, Ursula’s life

100  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound becomes a series of illusions followed by disillusion. Her dreaming is both a regressive defence and the mode of her hope and desire; if at times it shows signs of strain, if illusion becomes idealisation and if disillusion becomes catastrophic, it is abnormal only in degree, not in kind. Illusion is the precondition and condition of desire, of entry into the otherness of relationship; and it is in recognition of this that Lawrence called his novel The Rainbow, using the emblem which, since the Romantic period, has epitomised the subjective element in perception, the valorisation of objects whose worth depends on the position from which they are seen. At each stage of her personal, devotional, academic and working life from adolescence to adulthood, Ursula is driven by illusions that lead inexorably to disillusion. Most of these illusions are narcissistic idealisations of her sense of herself as a woman, including her adolescent dreams of herself with a fleshly Christ, used ‘as a means of re-acting upon herself’ (R 267). A comic epitome of her situation is seen in her attempts to read Idylls of the King. Locked in her bedroom and dramatising herself as a romantic maiden waiting for Lancelot to ride by, she is interrupted by her younger brother kicking the door, fearful lest her silence means that she is dead. The bucket scraped across the kitchen flagstones completes her return to ‘reality’. She cannot integrate her hopes and desires with the real world. In the botany lab she may see in a visionary flash that ‘self was a oneness with the infinite’ (R 409); but when she meets Skrebensky again on his return from South Africa, this new religious sense of the self does not extend into her love for him. Neither her sexual life nor its sublimation into religious faith establishes a creative balance in her life. It is the second phase of her affair with Skrebensky, repeating and intensifying the first, that brings her life to its crisis. As lovers they are narcissistic, each honing their sense of a ‘maximum self’ upon the whetstone of the other; no new ‘third thing’ is created between them to be reverenced wherein, says Lawrence, is ‘something finite and sad, for the human soul at its maximum wants a sense of the infinite’ (R 281). They are ‘playing with fire, not with love’ (R 280) and whilst, like Anna and Will, they reap a rich sensual harvest, their love has no future. Unconsciously Ursula is recapitulating her parents’ experiences in order to surpass them, whilst Skrebensky is forced to confront the dead end of his own self with a question that is really a statement: ‘Why did he never really want a woman, not with the whole of him: never loved, never worshipped, only just physically wanted her’ (R 294). He may vaguely begin to develop a new self with Ursula, ‘as from a bud’ (R 287), but like Will there are buds in him that will never develop and unfold. ‘At the bottom of his heart his self, the soul that aspired and had true hope of self-effectuation lay as dead, still-born, a dead weight in his womb’ (R 304). So, like Will, he must look outside and not within himself for

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  101 his raison d’être, turning not to the arts and crafts movement that had given Will his purpose but to the army and the late nineteenth-century colonial interests that it served. His role in the novel is to represent the falsity of man in his social dimension, dissociated from his own inner vitality, and it is this falsity that finally disillusions Ursula. If her love for Skrebensky is her greatest illusion in the book, her disillusion emerges as her greatest strength when, driven towards ‘selfeffectuation’, she lets her anger lead her where it will. This, indeed, is her only recourse; for, like her mother, she cannot turn to her lover ‘for him to lead her’ and, reacting against her mother, she shudders at the thought of children. Her extreme individualism marks the condition of her modernity and is the furthest point of development of the Brangwen family in the novel. Its causes lie deep in the industrial history of nineteenthcentury capitalism, in increased social mobility, the fracturing of rural communities, the decline of religious belief and the growth of feminist consciousness in women who suffer the ‘violation’ of competing in the patriarchal world (R 379). The burden of her unrealised self, which she imagines as ‘a seed buried in dry ash’ (R 405), lies heavily upon Ursula. Her view of the world, first formed in relationship with her father, becomes increasingly aggressive, paranoid and narcissistic, until finally, like so many women of the time tormented by the unrelenting conflict between das Eigene and das Fremde, between the demands of her self and those of other people, she succumbs to illness. Like Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow ends with the breakdown of its leading character; but there the similarity ends. As we have seen, Freud and Jung disagreed about the role of infantile causes in neurotic illness; and Freud’s belief that neuroses were the result of primary infantile fixations re-activated by later secondary factors is apt to Paul Morel’s fate in Sons and Lovers. Paul becomes ‘derelict’ because damaged in infancy; his tragic end is implicit in his beginning. The Rainbow, however, shares neither the realistic manner nor the tragic form of Sons and Lovers, and its diagnosis is opposite, Jungian. Ursula’s breakdown might be referred to a childhood oedipal fixation, but the novel renders her breakdown phenomenologically, as the result of present failure. Within an evolutionary schema dedicated to her coming-into-being, Ursula’s fateful decision to remain loyal to Skrebensky is, in Jung’s words, ‘an act of adaptation that has failed’;108 faced with the challenge of herself, she opts out, choosing a man as unfulfilled as her father. She will repeat the parental pattern. On Skrebensky’s return from South Africa she sensed ‘vaguely’ that ‘they were enemies come together in a truce’ (R 410); but she ignored the communications of her body. ‘Her will never relaxed, though her heart and soul must be imprisoned and silenced’ (R 411). This determination to hold fast to Skrebensky is the primary cause of her illness, frustrating her search for a real sexual connexion and a real religious belief.

102  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound Ursula’s hubristic search for maximum self-fulfilment by creating Skrebensky in the image of her own desire reaches its climax in the extraordinary scene of their love-making on the beach. ‘The fight, the struggle for consummation was terrible’ (R 445). Orgasm here is a mode of antagonism, masturbatory in its self-preoccupation and hostile in its use of the other. It is the furthest that the novel takes us into the disintegration caused by the use of sex for gratification, with ‘none of the dreadful wonder, none of the rich fear, the connection with the unknown, or the reverence of love’ (R 439). The enmity between Ursula and Skrebensky, hitherto hidden, is now beyond denial, and Skrebensky, with no creative soul or religious belief to sustain him, becomes, like Paul Morel, derelict, suffering from a destruction which is dead loss. Ursula meanwhile resembles her mother, victorious in combat but inwardly defeated. What causes her final collapse is that, when faced with possible pregnancy, she atavistically tries to assume her mother’s destiny and settle for maternity and marriage. It is the last great act of regression in the book. Her decision intensifies her sense of dissociation – ‘her flesh thrilled, but her soul was sick’ (R  448) – and makes her feel like a martyr tied to the stake. She is confronted in her crisis by the existential ambiguity of disillusionment: will her suffering end in dead loss, like that of Skrebensky or Paul Morel, or will it be creative, the source of a new birth like Lydia’s pains in Chapter II? When Ursula prefers das Fremde to das Eigene, her ‘true self’ (R 449), and decides to marry Skrebensky, her repressed desires begin to reassert themselves. It feels like the onset of ‘madness’ (R 450), and as she walks in the rain, her sense of the boundary between inner and outer starts to dissolve. In part, Mark Kinkead-Weekes argues, the novel has come full circle: Ursula confronts ‘the great background of her grandfather’s world: the big wind through which he walked to propose, the earth with its looming trees, the teeming rain, the power of the animal world he so confidently mastered’.109 But the blending of inner and outer is different here. Where there was once the creative harmony of an organic community, there is now crisis, and Ursula’s encounter with the horses shows the depth of her disintegration and the distance of her dissociation from the world. She was aware of their breasts gripped, clenched narrow in a hold that never relaxed, she was aware of their red nostrils flaming with long endurance, and of their haunches, so rounded, so massive, pressing, pressing, pressing to burst the grip upon their breasts, pressing forever till they went mad, running against the walls of time, and never bursting free. (R 452)

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  103 The anatomical impossibility of this vision accentuates Ursula’s blindness to reality. This is not the symbolism of classical Freudian psychoanalysis; the horse is not merely a symbol of repressed libido, as in Sons and Lovers. Instead, the symbolism follows the logic of Jungian psychosynthesis in providing an internal communication from the self to the self, offering a ‘subliminal picture of the psychological condition of the individual in his waking state’.110 It is Ursula’s own breast that is gripped tight, as she wills her spiritual determination to love Skrebensky upon the resistant lower sensual centres of her body. The course of Ursula’s illness is disclosed by the symbols and metaphors that articulate it. The internal conflict expressed in the horses is followed by the image of the stone in which she feels that she has sunk to the bottom of things, invulnerable to the change which is the condition of human life. Here, at the nadir of her illness, she becomes ‘inviolable’ (R 455), absolved from the patriarchal world, secure in herself in the knowledge that things can get no worse. Gradually a transformation is worked, as it were within the double meaning of the word itself, as the ‘stone’ transmutes into the kernel of a nut. This new image is no mere picture but a power, a self-communication, a therapeutic symbol which, like the rainbow, helps transform Ursula’s breakdown into a breakthrough, a creative rather than a destructive illness. Jung told the Psycho-Medical Society in 1913 that, ‘just as primitive man was able, with the aid of religious and philosophical symbol, to free himself from his original state, so, too, the neurotic can shake off his illness in a similar way’.111 Unconsciously anticipating regression into illness after breaking with Skrebensky, Ursula had retreated to her parental home, and now, as she recovers, it becomes a husk from which she must break free. ‘“I have no father nor mother nor lover”’, she tells herself (R 456), beginning revealingly with her father; even if she is pregnant, she will nurture the new life alone, free from patriarchal constraint. The ‘mutative metaphor’ of the nut ‘grew and grew upon her’ (R 456),112 with a ‘prospective or teleological’ urgency that, says Jung, typifies dreams of the recovering patient who is preparing to make ‘a new psychological adjustment’, and whose eyes ‘are more easily turned upon the future, than upon his inner life and upon the past’.113 It is the moment of her heroic recovery, when regression finally proves benign, not catastrophic. In the last two pages of the novel, as Ursula’s recovery becomes established, she makes ‘a new psychological adjustment’ in the areas that have most concerned her: her social alienation, her sexual relationships and her religious belief. No final resolution is proposed; the end of the novel is not the end of the quest. As Tom Brangwen said, there is ‘no end, no finish’ (R 126). The novel’s journey into widening circles of consciousness here reaches its furthest point, in an individualism which is at once a profound advance and an alienation. If, as Mark Kinkead-Weekes

104  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound supposes, this was Ursula Brangwen’s position in 1905, it was also the position of Otto Gross in 1907 when Frieda Weekley met him; as Gross saw in the Decadenceepoche of his age the womb of a great future, Ursula sees in ‘the horny covering of disintegration’ of the present the seed-bed of ‘a new germination’ (R 459). Her utopian vision of the future counterbalances the nostalgic vision of the past with which the novel began. Between dreams of past and future lies the dissatisfaction of the present, generating the poetry and myths that give history its meaning and direction. Ursula’s dissatisfaction at the last is not disillusioned but desirous, and it is this recovery of desire that constitutes her fictional significance. She has not found a lover but, after the narcissistic omnipotence of her love for Skrebensky, she is grateful that ‘she could not create her man’, that he ‘should come from the Infinite and she should hail him’ (R 457). This new faith recapitulates in transformed fashion ‘the wonder of the beyond’ that had once inspired the Brangwen women (R 13), and readies her for a time when she may both be with a man and ‘concurrently be with God’ (STH 57). It is the symbol of the rainbow that finally gives her hope and strength to face the future; it is another ‘mutative metaphor’, promising – as in Genesis – a covenant between eternity and time, confirming the presence of the beyond within the actual. Ursula’s vision may still be illusion, of course, fated to have its moment and pass. But those critics who, like Scott Sanders, find the end of the novel ‘little more than a gesture’ are wrong;114 it celebrates – and embodies – the capacity to generate illusion, to renew desire and wonder in pursuit of psychic balance and, to quote Eder again, ‘to replace the dying with the nascent faith’. The Rainbow is Lawrence’s myth for modern times, reharmonising in art the worlds of sex, labour and religion whose increasing discord during the nineteenth century it has charted; and in Ursula’s final nascent faith, it affirms the enduring power of human beings to imagine new points of balance between sensual and spiritual, conscious and unconscious, sex and religion, self and other. Even as Lawrence completed his final draft of the novel in the winter of 1914–15, however, his own hopefulness was being put to the test. Mark Kinkead-Weekes has shown how, to the last, Lawrence struggled to draw out ‘the “dark” and the destructive aspects’ of his vision.115 His own faith, the result of two years of living with Frieda, was strained to the utmost by the war and all that it represented; increasingly he took a dark view of the dissociation symbolised in Skrebensky’s shouldering the mechanical forms of public and military life (das Fremde) whilst surrendering his private life (das Eigene) to a frantic and empty sensuality. Worse was yet to come. In the autumn of 1915 The Rainbow was banned; the sick body rejected the proffered cure, and Lawrence’s view of the world darkened further still. His next novel, Women in Love, would take a much bleaker view of the destructiveness of the Decadenceepoche in which he lived.

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  105

Notes

106  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound

The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  107

51

52 53

54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Sulloway’s discussion of regression, see Freud, Biologist of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 269–73. Spielrein to Jung, 27 November 1917, in Aldo Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein between Jung and Freud, trans. by Arno Pomerans, John Shepley and Krishna Winston (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 53. Sonu Shamdasani, Jung Stripped Bare by His Biographers, Even (London: Karnac, 2005), p. 93. C.G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido: A Contribution to the History of the Evolution of Thought, trans. by Beatrice M. Hinkle (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 227. Jung, ‘Psychoanalysis’, in Long, p. 217. Page-references in this paragraph are to this essay. C.G. Jung, ‘On Psychological Understanding’, in Journal of Abnormal Psychology, vol. 9 (1915), p. 390. Page-references in this paragraph are to this essay. See Sonu Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 30 and, more broadly, the whole of chapter 1, for the importance of this concept for Jung. The doctor was Dr Crichton Miller, in The British Medical Journal (5 December, 1914), p. 968; Freud to Jones, 22 July 1914, in The Complete Correspondence, p. 294. Ernest Jones, ‘The Significance of the Unconscious in Psychopathology’, in The British Medical Journal, vol. 5 (December, 1914), p. 966. Ibid., p. 967. The Lancet, 5 September 1914, p. 650. The Complete Correspondence, pp. 288, 292. Ibid., p. 294. Quoted in Kerr, p. 450. The Complete Correspondence, pp. 300, 301. David Eder, Review of Jung’s Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology trans.by Constance Long, in School Hygiene, vol. 7 no. 3 (August, 1916) p. 135; quoted in The Lancet (21 March, 1914), p. 825. See Ferenczi’s Rundbriefe for 15 January and 1 May 1923, in the archives of the British Psycho-Analytic Society (CFC/FO2/56 and CFC/FO1/52). The quotation is from the latter. Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 201. David Eder, ‘Address on the Psycho-Pathology of the War Neuroses’, in The Lancet, 12 August 1916, pp. 264–8. David Eder, ‘Psychological Perspectives’, in The New Age (20 July, 1916), pp. 284–5. See Mark Kinkead-Weekes, p. 162. For the Nietzschean quotation, see Beyond Good and Evil, Pt. 1, §6. Jane Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual (London: Williams and Norgate, 1913), p. 41. Ibid., pp. 54, 50. Richard Swigg, Lawrence, Hardy, and American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 76. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 54. The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Collins, Fontana Books, 1960), p. 33n.

108  The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound











The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound  109 04 Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 103. 1 105 Balbert, p. 42. 106 Carol Sklenicka, D.H. Lawrence and the Child (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), p. 104. 107 Winnicott, ‘The Capacity to be Alone’, in Collected Works, V, p. 247. 108 Jung, ‘On Psychoanalysis’, in Long, p. 234. 109 Kinkead-Weekes, D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, pp. 206–7. 110 Jung, ‘Psychoanalysis’, in Long, p. 222. 111 Ibid., p. 224. 112 For the phrase ‘mutative metaphor’, see Murray Cox and Alice Theilgaard, Mutative Metaphors in Psychotherapy: The Aeolian Mode (London: Tavistock Publications, 1987). 113 Jung, ‘On Psychoanalysis’, in Long, p.  229; ‘Psychoanalysis’, in Long, p. 221. 114 Scott Sanders, D.H. Lawrence: The World of the Five Major Novels (New York: Viking Press, 1973), p. 92. 115 Kinkead-Weekes, D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, p. 223.

4

Women in Love Death of the Father

I Twilight in Italy: The Son of Otto Gross In the last section of Twilight in Italy, availing himself of a traveller’s freedom, the English narrator suddenly assumes a false identity. Two elderly Swiss ladies, mistaking his accent, ask if he is Austrian, and he replies that he is, that he comes from Graz, ‘that my father was a doctor in Graz, and that I was walking for my pleasure through the countries of Europe’ (TI 208). To the reader he explains himself further: ‘I said this because I knew a doctor from Graz who was always wandering about, and because I did not want to be myself, an Englishman, to these two old ladies’ (TI 209). Already in the previous chapter he had adopted ‘a sort of romantic, wandering character’ (TI 191); and now his new disguise bears fruit in a very un-English expression of emotion. As the old ladies tell of their sister who has died, they begin to cry, ‘and I, being an Austrian from Graz, to my astonishment felt my tears slip over on to the table’ (TI 209). This small episode reveals in miniature the literary method of the whole book. The ‘unobtrusive’ character of its narrator and the ‘impersonality’ of its narrative express Lawrence’s wish for a persona free from the constraints that bind the ego into its familiar social role.1 ‘The soul is not to pile up defences round herself’, he wrote later, praising the ‘open road’ of Whitman’s poetry (SCAL 157); its business is with the unknown world ahead, not with the known world behind. He wants his narrator free to travel empathically in time and place, exploring the emotional potentialities and thought-adventures stimulated by the people, landscapes and art-works he encounters. The Manchester Guardian thought the book ‘too subjective’ (TI lxii); but Lawrence’s concern, as in The Rainbow, is with das Dritte, the ‘third thing’, 2 the relationship that flourishes in what Winnicott calls the ‘potential space’ between subject and object.3 Twilight in Italy is a picaresque of the soul whose adventures build up a provisional historical picture of the civilisations of Italy, Germany, Switzerland and England, and the tears that Lawrence’s narrator discovers within himself in response to two elderly Swiss ladies prove that, in role-play, even an inhibited Englishman can learn to feel as other nations feel.

Women in Love: Death of the Father  111 As Paul Eggert tells us in an editorial note, the doctor from Graz whose son Lawrence’s narrator claims to be is ‘almost certainly Otto Gross’ (TI 296). But in what sense is this unseen character Otto Gross? And what of the narrator’s claim to know Gross, whom Lawrence had almost certainly never met? A contemporary reader could not have made Eggert’s identification; the narrator tells us only of the doctor’s Wanderlust. Yet if an ordinary reader could not have identified the doctor with Otto Gross, Frieda and her family circle most certainly could; and this suggests that at this point Lawrence intended his text to carry a private meaning for them. Remarkably, he identifies himself with the son of Otto Gross as though, succeeding Gross in Frieda’s bed, he was consciously developing an oedipal triangle in which Frieda played the part of the mother and Lawrence that of the son whose desire is to surpass the father. Did Lawrence really pretend to be the son of Otto Gross in Switzerland in September 1913? Or was this a 1915 fantasy belonging to the composition of Twilight in Italy? Mark Kinkead-Weekes assumes the former: that Lawrence, by virtue of walking ‘in the direction of Ascona and Frieda Gross’, had been prompted to assume the role of Gross’s son.4 We might add too that he had passed through Zurich the day before, where Ernst Frick was serving a one-year sentence, and that, in the evening, outside Zurich, he had watched a group of Italian anarchists rehearsing a play. Amidst the ‘horrible average ordinariness’ of bourgeois Zurich (TI 193), perhaps Gross and anarchism were on his mind. Equally well, two years later in 1915, there were still good grounds for thinking of Gross; for on 15 October, during the week that he wrote the final section of Twilight in Italy, Peter Jaffe, Otto’s son by Else Jaffe, lay dying of scarlet fever. Lawrence did not answer the letter that brought news of his death until 26 October, but he may have known of his illness earlier and been driven to identify himself rivalrously in Peter’s place as Gross’s true successor. One way of another, it is clear that the personal presence of Otto Gross and the political phenomenon of anarchism were both on Lawrence’s mind as he approached the end of Twilight in Italy; through his disguised reference to Gross, as in The Married Man and ‘New Eve and Old Adam’, he once again found a way to inform Frieda that he had taken the ideological measure of her former lover and surpassed him. The whole of the book is involved in this brief, covert judgement on Gross, and we may epitomise it here by concentrating on two earlier sections, ‘The Theatre’ and ‘Italians in Exile’. * Twilight in Italy presented a new Lawrence to the public, a cultural historian, a writer of ‘philosophy’, as Orage put it in The New Age. 5 In the midst of a European war, he appeared as a critic of European civilisation,

112  Women in Love: Death of the Father placing himself in the line of nineteenth-century writers who judged the present by propounding a myth of the Renaissance. His chapter on ‘The Theatre’ contains a discussion of Hamlet as sharp as anything he ever wrote as a literary critic. It was the climax of four years’ meditation beginning with ‘Paul Morel’ III in 1911 and differs interestingly from the oedipal readings of Hamlet that by 1915 had made such an impact on English culture. In his first version of this essay in 1913, Lawrence had noted Hamlet’s incapacity to love, his unhealthy obsession with judging others and the inappropriateness of seeing him acted by an Italian, ‘the natural man of hot heart, crawling to an anaemic tune’ (TI 76). But by 1915 Lawrence’s view of Italians had changed; instead of enjoying a rich bodily life, they had themselves become Hamlet-like, ‘suspicious, isolated, self-nauseated, labouring in a sense of physical corruption’ (TI 144). Strikingly, Lawrence no longer linked Hamlet to Oedipus Rex, as in the ‘Foreword’ to Sons and Lovers, but reverted to its more familiar nineteenth-century coupling with the Oresteia; and this was because, like Hamlet, the Oresteia focusses on the murder of a father-king. It is the father, not the mother, who now preoccupies him. Freud, in defending the universality of the Oedipus complex, had argued in Totem and Taboo that the guilt of parricide lay at the origin of all civilisation. It was an idea surely familiar to Lawrence, through Eder or Ernest Jones;6 but with a novelist’s historical specificity he placed the murder of the father-king at the origin of modern Europe only. ‘At the bottom of his own soul’, Lawrence wrote, ‘Hamlet has decided that the Self in its supremacy, Father and King, must die’ (TI 145). This unconscious desire for Old Hamlet’s death, shared by Gertrude, expresses the final end of a feudal age which, one-sided though it had been, had celebrated ‘this divinity of the flesh, this body imbued with glory, invested with divine power and might, the King, the Emperor’ (TI 146). Lawrence is in full agreement with Freud and Jones that the deepest wish of Hamlet’s soul is to murder his father; mistakenly he even claims that Hamlet murders Gertrude too, a Freudian slip indeed, perhaps originating in Paul’s poisoning of Gertrude Morel in Sons and Lovers. Yet it is not repressed oedipal desire that drives Hamlet but the ‘religious, philosophic tide’ of the Renaissance (TI 145), the ebb away from the glamorous power of the bodily self towards the democratic spirit of Christian self-sacrifice that Lawrence had already described in ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’. But whilst the ‘Study’ had shown body and mind in creative tension, each alternately predominant at different periods of human history, Twilight in Italy depicts a world where opposites are confounded, where the emotions of the body are conscripted under the banner of military idealism. Hamlet is presented as a founding myth of modern Europe in all its current lawlessness: the Father, the Lawgiver, is dead, leaving his son to suicidal despair. Nowhere in Europe are body and mind in creative opposition. North Europeans like

Women in Love: Death of the Father  113 Lawrence’s narrator travel south in search of a richer bodily life, South Europeans travel north in search of spiritual satisfaction; yet their migrations, driven by dissatisfied desire, meet only in the forlornness of mutual incomprehension. One such meeting occurs in ‘Italians in Exile’, when the narrator encounters a group of migrant workers working in Switzerland to escape Italian military service. The warmth of their manners and their memories of Italy are juxtaposed with the raw Swiss factory where they work and the drab tenements where they live, and the carnivalesque melodrama they rehearse is contrasted with the anarchism they profess. Alienated from a country of whose government and war they disapprove, they serve as a kind of double in the text, travelling north where the narrator is going south, and putting their faith in the mind where he puts it in the body. Orage was wrong to describe Lawrence’s ‘philosophy’ as ‘a return to paganism’ (TI lxv); it was a future that he sought, a community to sustain a balance between body and mind, between Father and Son ‘by the intervention of the Third’, the Holy Ghost (TI 126). But there is no such community in Twilight in Italy. ‘Where is the transcendent knowledge in our hearts, uniting sun and darkness, day and night, spirit and senses?’ (TI 113), the narrator asks; but there is no answer in the anarchism of the Italians. His mind, he says, ‘stopped like clockwork if I wanted to think of them and of what their lives would be, their future’ (TI 204). Their northward movement nullifies his own by what he calls ‘negative magnetism’ (TI 204), whilst their anarchism, with its Enlightenment faith in ‘perfectibility’ and ‘infinite harmony among men’, appears absurd in a Europe at war (TI 202). This meditation forms a perfect bridge to the concluding chapter of the book where the narrator claims to be the son of Otto Gross; for it is in developing his historical and philosophical framework highlighting the futility of anarchism that Lawrence is implicitly telling Frieda that he has surpassed her former lover. Yet although the son has surpassed the father and slain him in imagination, the narrator remains baffled by the inhibition of his thinking caused by the anarchists. ‘Even now I cannot really consider them in thought. I shrink involuntarily away. I do not know why this is’ (TI 204). Martin Green suggests this was because the anarchists reminded him that there was something heroic about Otto Gross, that he ‘was teaching and practising anarchism, was breaking the law in dangerous ways and suffering the retribution of society’,7 whilst Lawrence, by contrast, saw himself ‘as a compromiser, a writer, society’s entertainer, Frieda’s safe option’. Certainly Lawrence’s ongoing rivalrous attitude towards Gross suggests that, like Hamlet, he had doubts about his own manliness, and that these stemmed from feelings of insecurity about Frieda. In 1915 their marriage was under great strain, because of Frieda’s separation from her children, her uneasy status as a German national during the war and her feelings of neglect caused by Lawrence’s lionisation, and because of the poverty

114  Women in Love: Death of the Father from which they both suffered after the rejection of The Rainbow. It would have been like Frieda to compare the failure of Lawrence’s naïve political gestures with Russell and Murry in the summer and autumn of 1915 with the bolder vision of Gross, and Lawrence’s covert reference to Gross in Twilight in Italy is perhaps his reply. Gross’s anarchism, he suggests, like Russell’s programme of social reconstruction, is simply the latest ‘anaemic tune’ of a Renaissance rationalism anxious to impose itself upon the spontaneous living motions of the body. But if Lawrence could discount Gross’s ideas, it was less easy to discount his significance as a man and a lover; the king is dead, long live the king. Before the prowess of such a father figure, he must ‘shrink involuntarily away’. * On 21 October 1915, two days after sending ‘The Return Journey’ to the typist and five days before his letter to Else Jaffe about her son’s death, Lawrence consoled Cynthia Asquith for the loss of her brother at the front and told her of his wish to go to America to escape the nightmare of the war: If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out. And I am English, and my Englishness is my very vision. But now I must go away, if my soul is sightless for ever. Let it then be blind, rather than commit the vast wickedness of acquiescence […] I feel like a blind man who would put his eyes out rather than stand witness to a colossal and deliberate horror. (2L 414–5) This image of ‘exile as a blinding’8 shows how deeply Lawrence had appropriated the Oedipus myth to himself at the time that he was thinking about Gross; and it suggests too that he had understood his own complicity in the horror from which he was turning. The plague was both within and without: the destructiveness and psycho-sexual confusion of body and mind that were the symptoms of his own oedipal upbringing found their objective correlative in the destructiveness and confusion of war-time Britain. The individual tragedy of Sons and Lovers had become a cultural analysis, depicting the collapse of a liberal patriarchy into a lawlessness that left no possibility of healing communal life. Hence the desolation that marks the end of Twilight in Italy as its ‘unobtrusive’ narrator is left adrift with an ideal desire but, like an exile himself, without person or place to which to attach himself. In September 1915 Lawrence had interrupted his work on Twilight in Italy to write ‘The Crown’, his most powerful picture yet of the disintegration which the mind suffers, as it seeks compensation for its lifelessness in sentimentality, sensationalism or scientific analysis, all indulged

Women in Love: Death of the Father  115 like masturbation within the privacy of the self. Analysis especially, doubtless including psychoanalysis, is endemic in the modern world, and ‘analysis presupposes a corpse’ (RDP 280). Faced with the deathliness of their own complicity in the destructiveness of the world, people regress, and in ‘The Crown’, as already in The Rainbow, Lawrence showed how regression might work in opposite ways. It is, again, a Jungian vision. There is the return, or ‘reduction’, to a genuinely ‘child-like’ state (RDP 288), which facilitates new growth, and there is also a pornographic return to ‘childishness’ and ‘child-gratifications’ (RDP 285) such as he had sensed in Keynes and his Cambridge circle, which locked the self within the prison of itself. The same ambiguity characterised destructiveness. There is a destructiveness that makes for enhanced creativity, destroying the old ego so that a new self might be born, and there is a destructiveness that makes for death, denying the life of the body and protecting the ego against all challenges of the new. There is no guarantee which is which: one has to live out one’s own possibilities – ausleben, in Gross’s word – and hope to come through. In differentiating a healthy state of mind from its parodic simulacrum, Lawrence was deploying a Romantic theme that went back to Blake and Wordsworth. Illness tries to live as though it were well: even Satan, exiled from the Heavenly City, aped its architecture in Pandaemonium. Lawrence wanted to distinguish the creative from the perverse, the regressive destructiveness that held the promise of rebirth from that which was merely dead loss. It was a concern he would develop further in Women in Love where, in his most complex fiction yet, he drew again on his knowledge of Gross to dramatise the fortunes of two contrasting pairs of characters, one parodying the other as they each struggle through the sicknesses of their culture towards what they hope will be a better future. Ever since Murry’s review of Women in Love in Nation & Athenaeum, critics have complained that they can ‘see no difference’ between Birkin and Ursula, and Gerald and Gudrun.9 C.E. Bechhofer in The New Age similarly lamented that the characters ‘are so indefinite that they merge into each other. You cannot keep them apart’;10 and the novel in this way is true to the Decadenceepoche of its setting, where distinctions between health and sickness are readily confounded. The characters are doubles, Doppelgänger, with Lawrence’s language now masking and now manifesting the differences between them as they journey through the ‘semantic abyss’11 of the novel. It is only gradually, over time, that they reveal their potential, and of no-one is this more true than of Birkin and Gerald, opposites united in the struggle that divides them.

II Birkin, Gerald and Evolutionary Typologies On 5 September 1907, as we have seen, a few months after accompanying Frieda Weekley to England, Otto Gross had addressed the First

116  Women in Love: Death of the Father International Congress of Psychiatry and Neurology in Amsterdam on ‘Die Cerebrale Sekundärfunktion’, distinguishing in his paper between the broad shallow mind (verflacht-verbreiterte Bewusstsein) that was well-adapted to life in primitive cultures from the mind that was narrow and deep (verengt-vertiefte Bewusstsein) that was better adapted to the specialised needs of modern high cultures. Furthermore, he had argued, each type of mind had its own typical pathology: the verflacht-verbreiterte Bewusstsein was prone to hypomania, the verengt-vertiefte Bewusstsein to obsessive ideas and excessive feeling,12 and since the evolution of this latter type was still incomplete, it was always more likely to take a pathological than a progressive form. It was this judgement that had lain behind Gross’s paradoxical conclusion that the modern age was one of ‘produktiven Decadence’ whose evolutionary transformation was being worked through a degeneration into higher forms of life (Degeneration nach oben).13 Gross’s paper was published in 1908, and was perhaps the work he described, in a letter to Frieda Weekley of early 1908, as a ‘very small’ offspring of their love: it is certainly his only known work that both postdated his affair with Frieda and had seen ‘the light of day’ by early 1908.14 Whether or not Frieda saw the paper, she would have known of his dual typology – hitherto his most important contribution to psychiatry – and also of his belief that they were living in a Decadenceepoche, for he had spoken of it during their affair in spring 1907 and written to her about it later: You know my faith, that it is always only out of decadence that a new harmony in life creates itself – and that the wonderful age in which we find ourselves has been appointed the Epoch of Decadence which will be the womb of a great future. And the health recovered out of this decadence, perfected in a new balance and armed with a new strength, is free in me to be love.15 Ill-health was no mere medical contingency to Gross; his lifelong battle against morphine addiction was part of the evolutionary struggle to produce an Übermensch out of the pathologies of degeneration that beset the verengt-vertiefte Bewusstsein. Health and hygiene was the field upon which the heroic struggle for the future would be decided, with the victor free to love in the joyful spirit of a new post-Christian age. Even in the small ways in which the individual organism processed the daily excitement of new stimuli, Gross sensed the drama of the future struggling to unfold itself in the present. In Das Freud’sche Ideogenitätsmoment und seine Bedeutung im manisch-depressiven Irresein Kraepelins (1907) – a book he promised to send Frieda and which, as its title suggests, sets out to synthesise organic and functional theories of mental illness – he celebrated the Nietzschean ‘will-to-power’ that accompanied each new adaptation to stimulus, signalling the individual’s desire for

Women in Love: Death of the Father  117 self-fulfilment.16 The alternative was an act of repression which, inhibiting normal neural functioning, evinced a cowardly failure to adapt. Even at the biological level of cerebral functioning, Gross believed, each individual was morally implicated in the historical destiny of the race. It was this convergence of ethics and biology that provoked Max Weber to denounce him as a muddle-head (Confusionsrath).17 A typically ironic episode in Leonhard Frank’s Links wo das Herz ist describes Gross’s strenuous world-historical struggle against his drug-addiction.18 In order to conceive a healthy child, Dr Otto Kreuz undertakes a cure in a lake-side sanatorium. Crazed by four days without sleep or food, and daunted by his dependency, he suddenly decides, during a thunder-storm that turns the lake into ‘an infinite raging ocean’, to row to the other side. Only by risking his life could he save it. After 60 minutes of frenzied rowing across 2 kilometres of storm-tossed mistshrouded water, he reached the shore. ‘The doctor had proved that a man of sick will, who succumbs to temptations which the normal person resists with ease, is capable of a single act of will from which others would start back in affright’. Four weeks later, ‘he returned home, sunburnt, invigorated and completely cured’, prepared once more ‘to live dangerously in complete freedom’ the life of ‘the uninhibited, complex-free superman’.19 Twelve months later, his wife gave birth to a healthy boy. Like Kreuz’s adventure with the boat, Gross’s determination to give up drugs and thus to realise the future in himself was a heroic existential gamble to achieve something generally considered ‘pretty well impossible’ to accomplish alone. 20 Martin Green brings Gross’s typology closer to home, interpreting it as an elaboration of the relationship between father and son, presented as ‘psychological, cultural, and historical’ opposites.21 The verflachtverbreiterte Bewusstsein was useful in those ‘stormy eras in which empires are established’, like that of Bismarck’s and Hans Gross’s Germany;22 but now its brute practicalities, banal sentimentalities and bullying moral pieties are mere atavisms. In the modern world a new evolutionary type is needed, sensitive to the inner life, in touch with its own sexuality and responsive to art. Otto Gross found such a type in 1907 in Frieda Weekley, the ‘woman of the future’ whose love rescued him from ‘my most paralyzing doubts about the future of mankind and the value of my own efforts’,23 and corroborated him in both his personal need and his professional mission to rescue the verengt-vertiefte Bewusstsein from the repressions of a Decadenceepoche that was stifling the future in the moment of its birth. * Such typologies as that evolved by Gross were common at the time, and useful in policing the racial and social purity of late nineteenth-century patriarchy. By 1907 Gross had begun to confront some of the more

118  Women in Love: Death of the Father brutal amongst them, including, as Martin Green shows, those of his own father;24 the Social Darwinism of the son was antithetical to that of the father. But there was also a more formal, widely recognised academic problem to which such typologies were addressed, a problem which, says Sonu Shamdasani, lay at the heart of the new science of psychology.25 How can the mind study itself? How can psychology produce objectively scientific data when an individual subject is the agent of inquiry? It was partly a wish to allow for this subjective factor, the ‘personal equation’, that prompted Jung too to interest himself in psychological types, and to develop his own categories, partly derived from Gross’s distinction between verflacht-verbreiterte and verengt-vertiefte minds, of extrovert and introvert. Jung had actually introduced the term introversion in 1909, the year following his mutual analysis with Gross;26 but it was not until his 1913 paper delivered to the Munich International Congress of Psychoanalysis27 – Jung’s last address to a psychoanalytic congress – that these terms began to catch on. John Kerr sees the paper, diagnosing Freudian psychoanalysis as extrovert and Adlerian as introvert, as a brilliantly creative response to the isolation into which Jung fell following his quarrel with Freud. 28 Yet, for all its logistical cunning, it was a serious attempt to grapple with the subjectivity underlying the strengths and weaknesses of Freudian psychology, an attempt to think relativistically about a body of doctrine that thought of itself as true. Jung’s paper distinguished the extrovert, whose libido is directed towards the external world, from the introvert, whose libido is directed inwards, and described the characteristic pathology of each. The extrovert is prone to hysterical illness, projecting denied internal feelings into the external world, whilst the introvert is prone to dementia praecox, withdrawing interest from it. The paper, translated by Constance Long and published in Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology in 1916, had an instant success and its terms spread quickly beyond the confines of psychoanalysis. Lawrence would have heard them from Eder if from no-one else and, and already in April 1915 he was describing Dostoevsky as ‘a pure introvert, a purely disintegrating will – there was not a grain of the passion of love within him’ (2L 314). This new language formed part of the matrix in which Lawrence’s next novel, Women in Love, was taking shape; and whilst the distinctions signalled by Jung’s terms were deep in modern culture – the Schlegels and Wilcoxes in Howard’s End are obvious examples in Britain – Jung’s terminology surely helped Lawrence reflect on Gerald and Birkin and establish the differences between them. Such an assumption guards us too against certain critical errors, as that begun by Murry who saw Birkin as ‘quite recognizably’ a selfportrait by Lawrence, 29 or that repeated by James Cowan who found ‘inconsistency’ and ‘discordance’ in the love between Gerald and Birkin.30 The love of the two men is meant to be an attraction of opposites, a desire born in the awareness of limitation which they each wish to

Women in Love: Death of the Father  119 transcend. Barbara Mensch calls Gerald an ‘authoritarian personality’ with ‘a complete lack of introspection and ability to self-examine’.31 More historically, we might call him an extrovert with little insight into his own soul, whilst Birkin is an introvert unable to live effectively as a political animal within the real world. Hence his need to see it through in his soul. Their opposing pathologies are made clear in a sentence of spring 1916, later discarded from the novel: The two men talked together for hours, Birkin watching the hard limbs and the rather stiff face of the traveller in unknown countries, Gerald Crich catching the pale, luminous face opposite him, lit up over the edge of the unknown regions of the soul, trembling into new being, quivering with new intelligence. (WL 493) The stiffness of Gerald’s face suggests the typical pathology of the extrovert, a denial of the demands of the inner life, whilst the paleness of Birkin’s face suggests that of the introvert, an excessive emotional intensity accompanied by obsessional ideas. Jung’s account of his psychological types was free from the Social Darwinism of Gross; but, as Raymond Williams has shown, Lawrence’s thinking was profoundly influenced by such ideas around the time of World War I. In The Rainbow he presented the central character of each generation as the ‘leading shoot’ of their civilisation (R 13), and in Women in Love he contrasts what Williams calls ‘the rising social type’ represented by Birkin and Ursula with the ‘decadent’ social types of Gerald and Gudrun, in relationships that are profoundly implicated with ‘the future of the race’.32 Emile Delavenay has proposed Edward Carpenter, another critic of a pathogenic civilisation, as a source of Lawrence’s championing of the feminine Birkin as ‘the man of the future’ over the atavistic ‘man of action’, Gerald.33 But it is Gross, with his continuing presence in Lawrence’s marriage, his insight into the sado-masochistic basis of patriarchy, his interest in bisexuality and his sensitivity to the existential dangers of creative living who most influenced the Lawrence of Women in Love, and helped him imagine the character of Birkin as a new kind of man. As in Twilight in Italy, he was exploring and testing Gross’s ideas with the hope of surpassing them, and in Birkin’s final survival after Gerald’s death, he embodied the Nietzschean hope that he shared with Gross, the hope that their Decadenceepoche would prove the womb of a great future (Mutterschoos der grossen Zukunft).34

III Women in Love: The Death of the Father Most contemporary mental illness, Gross thought, was caused by an alien patriarchal authority penetrating ‘into our own innermost self’, 35

120  Women in Love: Death of the Father which the restoration of matriarchy alone could put to rights. Lawrence shared Gross’s diagnosis but not his cure. He rejected matriarchy as he had rejected the anarchism of the Italian exiles: history was the openended record of an ever-shifting balance between male and female, with no permanent just alignment possible between them. The Rainbow had shown ‘woman becoming individual, self-responsible, taking her own initiative’ (2L 165) and, alongside her new ascendancy, the decline of man and male authority. Women in Love shows this imbalance toppling still further into crisis, with the decline in patriarchal power symbolised by the long dying of Thomas Crich, as central to Women in Love as that of Mrs Morel to Sons and Lovers. Thomas Crich lived by the values of Christian paternalism, through which he hoped to mitigate the evils of social inequality. But his charity was a symptom of the condition he wanted to cure, and its failure embodied the ideological selfcontradictions of nineteenth-century capitalism. ‘He, the father, the patriarch, was forced to deny the means of life to his sons, his people’ (WL 224). This failure of his values only made him cling to them with greater tenacity, in a denial which gradually alienated him from an increasingly hostile work-force. The same failure and denial also characterised his marriage, as his wife with the old-fashioned instincts of an aristocrat resisted the democratic assumptions of equality underlying his paternal charity. But neither she nor his children can escape or surpass him; a vicious circle of action and reaction encloses them all, and the lingering horror of his slow death holds them in a nightmare from which they cannot wake. As early as Chapter II, when Thomas Crich absents himself during the wedding-party, there arises ‘a strange freedom, that almost amounted to anarchy, in the house. It was rather a resistance to authority, than liberty’ (WL 27–8), and it infects everyone. Gerald, the eldest son and heir to the family business, is split between maintaining family traditions and resisting them. A business-man with a taste for Bohemian life, he finds his conservative love of social order increasingly undermined by an anarchic desire for freedom that comes to terrify him. As his father approaches death, Gerald realises the hollowness of his own conventional social self. ‘He did not inherit an established order and a living idea. The whole unifying idea of mankind seemed to be dying with his father’ (WL 221). His extrovert preoccupation with the external world fails to disguise the emptiness of an inner life held together only by filial reaction. Lydia Blanchard thinks ‘Mrs Crich’s disorders have a fatal influence on her son’;36 but Barbara Ann Schapiro is nearer the mark in thinking that the failure of her husband ‘and the patriarchy he represents’ is more decisive.37 Both as child and adult, Gerald finds no relationship or belief strong enough to survive his destructive impulses and make them available for creative ends. The boy who played with guns and ‘accidentally’ shot his brother is now an adult playing with ‘great iron men’ that

Women in Love: Death of the Father  121 destroy the natural world and the men who work in it. What Gerald inherits from his father is ‘his own destruction’ (WL 221); and it is the chaotic, icy terror of this destruction, together with his determination to see it through to what Macbeth calls ‘th’utterance’ (III:1:71), that makes him the tragic hero of the book. Gerald’s problems with his father are symptomatic of a wider malaise in the novel. Hermione too fails to supersede the patriarchal world into which she was born; addicted to old aristocratic ideas of culture, she is ‘a leaf upon a dying tree’ (WL 293). The fact that her father is ‘mostly absent, abroad’ (WL 82) reinforces the novel’s theme of a liberal patriarchy that has abdicated its authority. Superficially Hermione enjoys the liberty of aristocratic life, but inside, like Gerald, she too finds that freedom entails destruction. After his father’s death Gerald feels that he has been ‘left on board of a ship that was going asunder beneath his feet’ (WL 221); Hermione, in the absence of hers, feels that her ‘voyage of life’ (WL 17) is headed for sea-sickness, shipwreck and death by drowning. The static beauty of her Georgian house, Breadalby, provides an ironic contrast to the storm of her inner life; for although, like the charming old manor-farm of Shortlands, it dates from a time when patriarchal power had real authority, its anachronistic survival into the twentieth century offers only a temptation to nostalgia. Lawrence, with his Nietzschean desire that people perpetually supersede themselves, was alert to the manifold ways of cheating the discipline of a life in time, and as Chapter XXVI (‘Chair’) confirms, the spiritual sin of nostalgia is one such way. In his daughters’ eyes Will Brangwen’s authority too is in decline. At the very start of the novel Ursula asks Gudrun how she finds him, and Gudrun answers: ‘“I haven’t thought about him: I’ve refrained”’. ‘“Yes”’, says Ursula (WL 10). The father has become unthinkable to his daughters, and yet their agreement leaves them fearful, ‘confronted by a void’. Ursula is alarmed by her revulsion against the ‘obsolete life’ of the home (WL 11), but fears she lacks the inner resources to break away. If she is bound to the known by her fear of the future, her sister is bound by the ‘nostalgic ache of desire’ (WL 117); the glamorous nostalgie de la boue that Gudrun feels for Beldover overdetermines her behaviour until the end of the book. Only in ‘Sunday Evening’ does Ursula’s fear of the future finally relax; not until ‘Flitting’ is she finally able to break away from the past and accept Birkin’s proposal of marriage. Even then her conduct is provocative, wrapping herself in narcissistic repudiation of her family in order to escape them. When her father is duly provoked by the casualness of her announcement that she is to be married next day, and slaps her face, Ursula’s tears express what Birkin calls, with perfect ambiguity, the ‘“love of opposition”’ (WL 367) between them. She weeps the regressive hopeless tears of a child whose parents have gone missing from its heart, leaving behind a love that can only be sensed in its absence.

122  Women in Love: Death of the Father Brangwen’s fury springs from a frustration that has been growing throughout the book, as his daughters’ mockery undermines his masculinity and fatherhood: ‘He was irritable to madness, he could not rest, his daughters seemed to be destroying him. But he was inarticulate and helpless against them. He was forced to breathe the air of his own death’ (WL 262). Lawrence’s allusion has already been made explicit in Birkin’s jibe against Ursula as a latter-day Cordelia (WL 169). When Will Brangwen curses his two eldest daughters in a fury of impotent rage, he discloses the failure of nineteenth-century bourgeois patriarchy as surely as the tempestuous rages of King Lear disclose the failure of feudal patriarchy in early modern Britain. Birkin’s judgement, on asking Brangwen for Ursula’s hand, is final: ‘her father was not a coherent human being, he was a roomful of old echoes’ (WL 257). Brangwen belongs to a world that has passed away from the consciousness of the next generation, and the insubstantiality of his life is symbolised in the empty house from which Ursula retrieves her belongings in ‘Flitting’. Any nostalgic idealisation of a ‘little grey home in the west’ (WL 374) is denied in the meaninglessness of the actual house before her. Even her final farewell from her parents is ‘more like a verification of separateness than a reunion’ (WL 387). The bad faith with which Gudrun later appeals to her sisterly loyalty towards ‘“Father and the rest of us, and all that it means, England and the world of thought”’ (WL 437) is useless as well as offensive; for Ursula has already begun to realise the paradoxical possibilities of superseding herself: ‘she knew herself new and unbegotten, she had no father, no mother, no anterior connections, she was herself, pure and silvery, she belonged only to the oneness with Birkin’ (WL 409). At first sight Birkin too seems to exist with ‘no anterior connections’, as though he had enjoyed the miraculous birth of a hero, untainted by parental authority. Despite Raymond Williams’s wish to generalise his condition, he is the only character in the novel who may be justly described as ‘free from all determinations’,38 and yet he owns up to a surrogate parent. When Gerald says that, though we curse England, we love it really, Birkin corrects him at once: ‘“But it’s a damnably uncomfortable love: like a love for an aged parent who suffers horribly from a complication of diseases, for which there is no hope”’ (WL 395). The reference to Thomas Crich is clear and confirms his symbolic importance to the novel. What Birkin’s words imply is that, like Gerald, Ursula and Gudrun, he too is struggling with a ‘love of opposition’, directed at everything that is English within himself. ‘“I’m an Englishman, and I’ve paid the price of it”’, he says bitterly (WL 396). It is possible, certainly, to interpret his autogenous status in the novel as a screen for Lawrence’s own oedipal situation, to read his messianic impulses as a sublimation of Lawrence’s childhood desire to rescue his mother, thus exemplifying the God Complex that in 1913 Ernest Jones traced to oedipal attachment39 – and Lawrence does allow us to think of Birkin’s redemptive urges as

Women in Love: Death of the Father  123 symptoms of sickness. Twice he is accused of megalomania (WL 104, 384); Ursula mocks him as a ‘“Salvator Mundi”’ (WL 128), Halliday as a Jesus harrowing hell. Yet the reader, knowing nothing of Birkin’s family history, must approach him culturally; and as Gross would have grasped immediately, his sicknesses are seen to be the result of the world he inhabits, of the internalisation of its patriarchal authority. His hostility to his fatherland embodies the Vaterbekämpfung of all his generation in their search for a new way of living to replace the outworn models of nineteenth-century patriarchy. Birkin’s part in this search is imaged in his struggle for bodily and spiritual health, whilst the novel itself subsumes all the characters’ struggle ‘against the father and against patriarchy’40 under a broader analysis of a dying European culture which it hopes to surpass through the coercive mythos of its fiction.

IV Women in Love: Patriarchy as Rape Gross’s essay ‘Overcoming the Cultural Crisis’ mobilises its attack against Vaterrecht by identifying patriarchy with rape: The revolutionary of today, who with the help of the psychology of the unconscious sees the relations between the sexes in a free and propitious future, fights against rape in its most primordial form, against the father and against patriarchy.41 To describe patriarchy as rape (Vergewaltigung) is not merely to utter a metaphorical rallying cry but to give a literal account of the violent intrusiveness with which men were legally free to transgress upon the rights of women; the roots of sado-masochism – the issue that baffled Freud in 1905 – lay in social power. Women and children were its primary victims, but so too were men, heterosexual and homosexual alike. Gross’s 1913 writings contrast the pure great third thing (das reine grosse Dritte) of future relationships with the rape constellation (Konstellation-Vergewaltigung) of contemporary bourgeois family-life, focussing on the psychological damage caused directly by patriarchal power and indirectly by its internalisation within the individual. Even the supposedly universal oedipal sexualisation of childhood is derived from the power relations of patriarchal family-life, from the child’s envious sense of exclusion from its parents’ relationship. Such sexual envy (Sexualneid) underpins the rape constellation and ensures its perpetuation, even whilst disclosing the weakness at its root. ‘The rapist is the sick man’, Gross wrote, ‘the drowning man, who bears the mark of inferiority’, of ‘a weakness that capitulates before the anxiety of life’.42 It was this sickness, this sadistic weakness that, in Gross’s view, prevented the bourgeois from fulfilling his evolutionary purpose and transforming himself into the Übermensch.

124  Women in Love: Death of the Father There is no evidence that Lawrence knew of this new stage of Gross’s work; yet there are two channels through which he may have heard of it. In the first place, if Else and Edgar had not read the articles in Die Aktion, they would have been familiar with their contents, which were well-known around the Munich cafés and bars that Edgar frequented, and they would have discussed them with Frieda and Lawrence. Second, at the time that Lawrence was meditating Women in Love, Gross presented his views of patriarchy as rape in a long essay, ‘Über Destruktionssymbolik’, his first psychoanalytic publication for five years, which appeared in the November–December 1914 issue of the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie, edited by Stekel with whom Gross had been in analysis since July 1914. Despite the fact that Freud had blackballed the Zentralblatt when he surrendered it to Stekel in 1912, it continued to circulate in psychoanalytic circles in London – Jones was reading it in February 1914 – and, if the November–December issue reached London in the early days of the war, as a number of such periodicals did, usually through Switzerland, either Jones or Eder would surely have shown Frieda a copy. For both men would have known of her acquaintance with Gross: Frieda was not reticent about her past. The openness that led her to talk to Bertrand Russell about her acquaintance with ‘Austrian Freudians’ also led her to talk to Jones about Otto Gross, a fact duly remembered when he came to write his autobiography where, discreetly, he described Frieda as ‘the bosom friend of Otto Gross’s wife, a lady I had known well in my Munich days’.43 ‘Über Destruktionssymbolik’ is a study of the psychological conditions that sustain human relationships and the social conditions that destroy them. It constitutes a double challenge to Freudian methodology by considering individual psychological illness as a function of personal relationships, and by considering those relationships in turn as a function of socio-political conditions. It is a relational, political theory, denying that psychological conflict is inherent in the species. Human beings are the result of a long evolutionary process of adaptation and are well suited to survive; it is their societies that make them ill. Their basic drives are twofold: the drive to form relationships, and the drive to preserve their integrity (das Eigene) against the alien impingement of other people (das Fremde). The balance postulated between these two drives recalls Birkin’s image in Women in Love of the gravitational and centrifugal forces that hold two heavenly bodies in orbit round each other. People strive, says Gross, not to rape and not to be raped. But for children the struggle is an unequal one. Parents within the patriarchal system present them with a bleak choice: be lonely, or become like us. Their powerlessness, and the alien authority within them, perverts their instinct not to rape into the sadistic over-compensation that Adler called the masculine protest. Similarly, Gross adds in a supplement to Adlerian theory relevant particularly to women, their instinct not to be raped is

Women in Love: Death of the Father  125 perverted into masochism. Women today are torn between a desire for children and a desire to be true to themselves: they either succumb to masochism and marry, or try to escape their fate as women by wishing to be men. Only in a matriarchy where motherhood is endowed can a woman become herself, free from economic dependence on one particular man. Gross shows a patriarchal world where those who fail to adapt are tormented by loneliness and gender-identity problems, where heterosexual relationships are experienced as sado-masochistic rape and where homosexual relationships are sought out as an alternative. It is a world contiguous with that of Women in Love. Lawrence had been thinking about Dostoevsky in February 1916, before he began to write Women in Love, and it is usual to refer to the Russian quality of the novel, the ‘Dostoevskian intensity’ of its characters.44 But Lawrence was thinking about Gross too. Whilst reading The Possessed, he was also correcting proofs of ‘The Return Journey’, where he played at being Gross’s son, and the two strands of thinking came together in a letter to Murry and Katherine Mansfield of 17 February, where he called Dmitri Karamazov ‘sadish because his will was fixed on the social virtues, because he felt himself wrong in his sensual seekings’ (2L 543). Dmitri Karamazov had devoted himself to das Fremde at the expense of das Eigene; and the unfamiliar word sadish, newly assimilated into Lawrence’s vocabulary, suggests the psychoanalytic context of his thinking. It was a context that would feed into his portrayal of the sado-masochistic relationship of Gerald and Gudrun, and the struggle of Birkin and Ursula to surmount patriarchal structures of feeling and achieve das reine grosse Dritte, free from the wish to rape and the wish to be raped. * Women in Love is structured by the antithesis between relationships dominated by the Konstellation-Vergewaltigung and those which hope to transcend it. No major twentieth-century artist, says Lydia Blanchard, has shown better than Lawrence ‘the destruction that inevitably occurs when one person tries to dominate or control another’,45 and in Women in Love he shows that destruction by depicting patriarchy along a spectrum that extends from bossiness and bullying at one end to rape at the other. The novel announces its theme at once, with Laura Crich’s flight from her bridegroom around the walls of the church where they are to be married. In The First ‘Women in Love’ Birkin comments: ‘“it’s quite in the classic tradition: flight of the bride, pursuit of the groom, and a show of rape”’ (FWL 25). It is a comic initiation into a theme that will eventually turn tragic, contaminating everyone in the novel. The language of rape was not new to Lawrence; in The Rainbow, Ursula had felt ‘as if violated to death’ when driven to beat her pupils in

126  Women in Love: Death of the Father the bullying man’s world of education (R 371). But in Women in Love it intensifies and becomes central to the poetic structure of the novel. When Birkin proposes to Ursula, only to find her in a brittle state of narcissistic withdrawal, her father’s ugly mockery of her conduct leaves her feeling ‘violated’. Birkin too feels his hopes of marriage are ‘violations’ to her (WL 260). Both men, she says, only want to bully her. Her father is enraged: ‘“Bully you! Why, it’s a pity you can’t be bullied into some sense and decency”’ (WL 261). The word hurts, and Ursula uses it again later on the eve of her marriage: ‘“You only wanted to bully me – you never cared for my happiness”’ (WL 365). In his fury her father strikes her across the face. But she persists: ‘“What has your love meant – what did it ever mean? – bullying, and denial”’ (WL 366). This is her response to the impingements of the man’s world, and if wrong about Birkin, she is right about her father. Will Brangwen is the epitome of the Vergewaltiger as Gross defines him: weak, anxious, repressed and marked by the same sense of inferiority as in The Rainbow. He resorts to force because he cannot love, and because contemporary ideologies of masculinity and fatherhood permit it. It is against those ideologies that Birkin struggles to express his new idea of relationship as a third thing existing between people. In The First ‘Women in Love’ he tells Ursula he wants a relationship where ‘“I am gone, and you, the female, are gone – there exists only the third thing, the new-created”’ (FWL 173); as Ursula remembers later, he wants ‘a third thing, a true life, the product of both of them’ (FWL 270). Though these two passages were later omitted, there remains the most striking passage of all, when Birkin is consoling Ursula after her father has struck her and, suddenly, his vision comes home to him: there was no I and you, there was only the third, unrealised wonder, the wonder of existing not as oneself, but in a consummation of my being and of her being in a new One, a new, paradisal unit regained from the duality. (WL 369) Gerald and Gudrun provide us with the clearest evidence of Gross’s influence on the novel. What Barbara Ann Schapiro calls their ‘sadomasochistic scenario’, the ‘eternal see-saw’ of their power-struggle, with ‘one destroyed that the other might exist’ (WL 445), shows how ‘the sadistic and masochistic roles alternate between them’.46 By 1916 Lawrence probably knew of Freud’s theory of sado-masochism and his view that ‘a sadist is always at the same time a masochist, although the active or the passive aspect of the perversion may be the more strongly developed in him and may represent his predominant sexual activity’.47 Yet Gross had significantly enhanced Freudian theory by tracing sado-masochism to its familial, social and cultural origins and locating those origins in the Konstellation-Vergewaltigung of patriarchy. Rather than the technical

Women in Love: Death of the Father  127 language of Freudian psychoanalysis, it was the poetic language of rape deployed by Gross, so un-English in its directness, that helped Lawrence conceptualise the tragic perversity of his theme. The patriarchal prejudices that shape Gerald’s attitude to women are revealed early in the novel by his behaviour towards the young woman known equivocally as Pussum. It is a relationship of sado-masochistic collusion. Although able to stab a male acquaintance in the hand, Pussum’s childish, slave-like submissiveness is the predominant mode of her sexuality, and her submissiveness arouses Gerald’s ‘male strength’ (WL  64). ‘He felt an awful, enjoyable power over her, an instinctive cherishing very near to cruelty. For she was a victim’ (WL 65). Even whilst relishing his power over her, however, he senses her power over him, drawing him masochistically on to his own destruction as though by drowning (WL 76). His greatest terror, he confesses, suggesting the darkness of their shared knowledge, is of ‘being bound hand and foot’ (WL 67). Gerald may feel initially ‘generous’ towards the pregnant girl before him; but what passes between them is sensed next morning when she wears the ‘inchoate look of a violated slave’ (WL 80). Such a Konstellation-Vergewaltigung is not untypical of the abusive businessman adrift in Bohemia; nor is it untypical of Bohemian life itself, as Loerke’s treatment of his model shows. Gerald aims to settle his account with Pussum by giving her money; but it is his own conscience he wants to salve. As Birkin says, he is ‘all in bits’ (WL 97); like the society in which he lives, he is split between bourgeois propriety and a Bohemian café life that the novel dramatises as a kind of hell. The theme of rape culminates in ‘Coal-Dust’ where, before the watching Brangwen sisters, Gerald presses his terrified Arab mare against the level-crossing gates whilst the noisy pit-train passes. If this is male display, it is also the action of an extrovert who avoids self-knowledge by projecting inner conflict out into the world. It is mere rationalisation to say the horse must be trained. Ursula is outraged: ‘“Does he think it’s manly, to torture a horse? It’s a living thing, why should he bully it and torture it?”’ (WL 113). With the instinct of opposition she grasps both the image of patriarchal power that inspires Gerald and the dissociation it entails. ‘Both man and horse were sweating with violence. Yet he seemed calm as a ray of cold sunshine’ (WL 111). The Platonic image of horse and rider, demonstrating a man in control of his passions, is subverted to show a man out of touch with his passions, with all the rich aliveness of the natural world embodied in his horse. His face is ‘shining with fixed amusement’ (WL 111); but the smiling public man who trains his horse is dissociated from the cruel bully who brings down his spurs again and again on the wounds in the mare’s bleeding sides. The clarity of Ursula’s anger, which rejects what is destructive to the self, is contrasted with the perversity of Gerald’s cruelty, which fosters it. What he does to the mare he does to himself. The masochistic component of

128  Women in Love: Death of the Father his sadism is shown as he brings the rearing horse down ‘almost as if she were part of his own physique’ (WL 112). It is not only the horse he must bring up to the mark; it is himself, the masterful male self that he aspires to be, dominating the resistant life of his body. Behind all his actions there is an envy that, like the ressentiment of Nietzsche, binds the self to itself and inhibits the self-transcendent recognition of otherness. The sexual component of Gerald’s cruelty to the mare is clear. ‘It seemed as if he sank into her magnetically, and could thrust her back, against herself’ (WL 110); he was ‘keen as a sword pressing in to her’ (WL 111). Gudrun’s reaction conveys the violation forcefully. Gerald’s cruelty binds her in a spell whose occult nature testifies to the unconscious power of her sado-masochism. Lawrence uses his most incantatory prose to convey her identification with both horse and rider. Gudrun was as if numbed in her mind by the sense of indomitable soft weight of the man, bearing down into the living body of the horse: the strong, indomitable thighs of the blond man clenching the palpitating body of the mare into pure control. (WL 113) The recurrent pressing of the spurs into the bloody wound on the horse’s flanks has all the force of a violent rape, and leaves Gudrun momentarily unconscious. It is a liminal moment for her, an entry into an enlarged sphere of knowledge, an initiation into a new stage of psychological disintegration. Symbolically, it is a descent into the next circle of hell, a moment of negative transcendence parodying the moments of genuine self-surpassing in the book. Its perversity, its dissociative tendency, is revealed when she recovers consciousness to find herself ‘hard and cold and indifferent’ (WL 112); she has had her experience but not as part of the living texture of her life. It has been predominantly visual, a pornography of violence that is immediately disowned. Its power, however, is enough to make her give herself away; for after the train has passed, she flings wide the level-crossing gates for Gerald and, as he passes, screams at him ‘like a witch’ (WL 112), with an occult power of her own: ‘“I should think you’re proud”’ (WL 112). Her cry declares her desire in all its naked ambivalence. It is not only the railway gates she throws open for Gerald but also herself, and yet her admission is simultaneously a declaration of war against him. It is a critical moment for their love, a crossing-point into a future whose nature is foreshadowed in the ‘underworld’ of Beldover (WL 115) into which they separately turn. It is the purgatorial coldness of the Alps, however, that finally gives them their consummation. Abandoned to the crystalline beauty of the landscape Gudrun feels ‘übermenschlich’ (394), in the grip of a megalomania that is the antithesis of the envy that first drew her to Gerald. Once again she surpasses herself in a negative transcendence that ushers

Women in Love: Death of the Father  129 her into richer knowledge of her deepening perversity. Like some late Ibsen heroine she sees herself in the frozen beauty of the mountains. It is a vision that excludes Gerald, and her absorption in the frozen landscape twice provokes his retaliation, as he tries to regain the mastery. The passion came up in him, stroke after stroke, like the ringing of a bronze bell, so strong and unflawed and indomitable. His knees tightened to bronze, as he hung above her soft face, whose lips parted and whose eyes dilated in a strange violation. (WL 401–2) On this occasion Gudrun resists only briefly before becoming ‘soft and inert, motionless’, her eyes dilating ‘as if in a kind of swoon of fascination and helplessness’ (WL 402). On the next occasion, however, she is ready: ‘now she was not to be violated and ruined’ (WL 446). Now it is Gerald who is the ‘victim’ (WL 445), the proud integrity of his body seemingly opened in a ‘wound’ (WL 446) like that he once inflicted on his mare. Gudrun again turns to the landscape for corroboration and, when challenged by Gerald, winces ‘in violation and fury’ (WL 447). Her reply is ‘cold, brutal’ and, enraged, he vows to kill her. Their relationship is a simulacrum of ‘the third thing’ sought by Birkin; their sense of self is hollowed out by the sado-masochistic rhythm of their hatred and desire and, as Linda Ruth Williams shows, they collude in a compensatory exhibitionism and voyeurism that depend upon their being ‘always at a distance’ from each other.48 The drama is epitomised in the scenario of ‘Coal-Dust’. According to Masud Khan, ‘all perversions entail a fundamental alienation from self’49 and Gerald, posed on his horse, epitomises the false patriarchal self, perversely pursuing happiness where it cannot be found. ‘The inconsolability of the pervert’, Khan adds, ‘is matched only by his insatiability’. Gerald, after failing with Pussum, turns to the dangerous, powerful Gudrun, bullying her to give him the happiness he lacks. As he rides up to the level-crossing gate, Gudrun, dressed in yellow coat and rose stockings, gazes with pleasure at him. She turns the world into spectacle, filling the empty spaces of her life with aesthetic contemplation as an immunisation against the claims of the real world where she feels inadequate. When her voyeurism breaks down because of her desire for other people, she finds, like Iago, that her appreciation of their beauty is compromised by the destructive power of her envy. ‘“God, what it is to be a man!”’ she exclaimed at the sight of Gerald swimming (WL 47), and even as she is drawn towards him, she rouses herself in opposition. In a fascinating passage typical of her reading of Lawrence, Barbara Ann Schapiro translates the instability of Gerald and Gudrun’s love into the language of modern object-relations theory. It is characterised, she says, ‘not only by the polarity of domination and submission, but also by

130  Women in Love: Death of the Father that of grandiosity and contempt, of idealisation and repudiation – the seesaw of narcissistic experiencing’.50 Lawrence’s own language, however, has its roots in the sado-masochistic tick-tack of action and reaction that characterised Gross’s Konstellation-Vergewaltigung. In Gerald he shows the loneliness of the patriarchal rapist, and in Gudrun the desolation of the Adlerian masculine protest, as described by Eder to the BMA in 1913 and by Gross in ‘Über Destruktionssymbolik’. Their affair embodies the self-destructiveness of lovers who, unable to construct the third thing of a relationship by acknowledging one another’s otherness, merely replicate in new ways the failures of their parents. The cycle of emptiness and envy, of bullying and coercion, continues. It is from this dead end of patriarchalism that Birkin tries to escape through his relationship with Ursula.

V Birkin and the New Man Both Birkin and Ursula are tainted by the patriarchal power they oppose. Her father and her headmaster have sensitised Ursula to male bullying, and in ‘Mino’ she rages at the ironic poise that masks Birkin’s identification with the sexual behaviour of the male cat. ‘“Oh it makes me so cross, this assumption of male superiority!”’ she cries. ‘“It is just like Gerald Crich with his horse – a lust for bullying – a real Wille zur Macht”’ (WL 150). So cross is she at Birkin’s apparent sexism that she mishears him describe woman as a ‘satellite’ of man (WL 150) – one of the book’s many examples of the psychopathology of everyday life, suggesting there is no such thing as an accident and that everything hangs together ‘in the deepest sense’ (WL 26). Ursula’s hypersensitivity expresses an unreconstructed feminism which, like her narcissistic view of sexual love, is merely reactive: ‘Man must render himself up to her: he must be quaffed to the dregs by her. Let him be her man utterly, and she in return would be his humble slave – whether he wanted it or not’ (WL 265). Clearly Ursula can bully too. Her early idealisation of her father and subsequent disillusion have taught her that love is a matter of mastery and submission. The Konstellation-Vergewaltigung of patriarchy, its master-slave dialectic, its sado-masochistic cycle are all reproduced in the ideology of its romantic life, and it is against this that Birkin struggles, even as he is implicated in it. His bullying is everywhere to be seen. Hermione attacks him with a paperweight because he hectors her in a ‘violent, cruel’ way (WL 104) about the need to respect the otherness of other people. The irony is clear, and Ursula reinforces it when she accuses him of intimidating other people to gain their assent and love: ‘“You try to bully Gerald – as you tried to bully Hermione”’ (WL 363). His bullying constitutes one side of Birkin’s sado-masochism, and his misanthropy the other; they are the compromised defences of a frail self utilising all its psychological and

Women in Love: Death of the Father  131 cultural resources to ward off threats of external impingement and fears of internal inadequacy. His misanthropy resembles a nauseous disgust, like that of a man evacuating poison from his body, and it lies at the root of his frequent illnesses. His words about Winifred apply equally well to himself: ‘“Winifred has got a special nature”’, he tells Gerald. ‘“She’ll never get on with ordinary life”’ (WL 208). It is introverts like Winifred and Birkin, at the growing tip of their civilisation, who suffer most because they are at odds with the outmoded patriarchal structures that have contaminated them. They are, in Gross’s words, symptoms of ‘produktiven Decadence’, types of ‘Degeneration nach oben’, the neurotic products of a pathogenic society. Birkin’s struggle is archetypically that of the introvert. Unlike Gerald, he has no practical plan to change the world; his hope is to find new ways of living in it, to find new myths and metaphors with which to reinterpret it. He wants the ‘“third heaven”’ of a marriage (WL 290) quite distinct from patriarchal matchmaking where ‘“it is all possessions, possessions, bullying you”’ (WL 356). In a novel where houses and homes loom large, Birkin defies property and ‘“the exclusiveness of married love”’ (WL 352). His aim is to be ‘“disinherited”’ (WL 362), to avoid all definitions of the self that come from outside and belong to the past (das Fremde); it is the definitions from within that look to the future that count (das Eigene). He wants to shape his life as Rodin made sculptures, with surroundings sketchy and unfinished, so that he is ‘“never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside”’ (WL 357). Most men and women, like the couple in ‘Chair’, experience love and marriage as ‘conscription’ (WL 199), a typically large metaphor suggesting the common patriarchal origins of the battle of the sexes and World War I. Birkin will not enlist in such a marriage. ‘What it was in him he did not know, but the thought of love, marriage, and children, and a life lived together, in the horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction, was repulsive’ (WL 199). The idea of marriage he offers in ‘Mino’, which Ursula mishears, is an attempt to honour and safeguard the isolation of a self ‘“that does not meet and mingle, and never can”’ (WL 145). Birkin’s image of the two stars circling each other insists upon the separateness of each whilst emphasising the relationship between them – das Dritte, the third thing which, for Lawrence in his revision of Gross, consisted equally of the gravitational force of desire and the centrifugal force of hate. Ursula, more realistic, resists Birkin’s metaphor of the stars and thinks his need for metaphor a weakness. This tension between them gives meaning to the book as it shifts between mythical and realistic hermeneutics, between the Weltanschauung of the introverted Birkin and that of the more extrovert Ursula. There is a hint of rapprochement at the end of ‘Snow’ when Ursula accepts the need to see the world through ‘in one’s soul’ (WL 438); but this cannot save the novel from the subjectivity

132  Women in Love: Death of the Father of the ‘personal equation’. Birkin uses his metaphor of the orbiting stars like that of the two cats, to symbolise his belief in the equality of men and women in their gendered, biological difference – a difference that had enabled David Eder, for one, to accept the formulation that, both morphologically and instinctually, ‘men and women represent different species’.51 Linda Ruth Williams berates Lawrence for the contradiction into which he regularly falls between his firm sense of the binary biological distinction between men and women and the fluid gender constructions of so much of his fiction; she finds this the ‘Achilles’ heel’ of his writing.52 Yet this contradiction is one of the central themes of Women in Love, as Birkin battles to salvage a sense of his own manliness from the cultural constructions of his society. He searches urgently throughout the novel, testing biological theories of manliness, often idealised out of any possible connexion with biology, whilst simultaneously exploring a fluid sense of his own sexual identity that dissolves the binary structures of biology altogether. His theories are an attempt to escape the dead-end of his culture, to give definition to his life and to save Ursula and himself from the sado-masochism of romantic love. But Ursula is unimpressed; she fears his theories betray a bully who cannot love and, not without reason, feels threatened and diminished by his views of gender. Yet Birkin persists. His quarrel with Ursula in ‘Mino’ recapitulates the quarrel that Lawrence had been having with Frieda since 1912. Like Frieda, Ursula believes that ‘love is freedom’ (WL 152), and Birkin replies that she prefers chaos to creation. She is, he implies, like the little wild cat that has come out of the woods. Small wonder she reacts so fiercely. Yet his fundamental proposition, that commitment is necessary for sexual love to be creative, is less provocative than the examples he gives of it: his mission is to make Ursula keep faith, to counteract the promiscuous reaction against patriarchal monogamy that Gross had encouraged. Birkin will later attack the exclusiveness of bourgeois love; but here he calls love ‘“a direction which excludes all other directions”’ (WL 152). In one way, this is no more than an idealised version of bourgeois values; love is to provide the ‘superfine stability’ (WL 150) that homes and possessions provide for the bon bourgeois. In another way, however, he is struggling to say something important: that commitment matters in love, and that commitment implies accepting the difference of the other person. The contradictions into which he falls are part of the meaning of the book, as he struggles to assert the idea of equality in difference. The general infection of the age is often too much for him, however, and the scene of what appears to be anal sex in the Alpine hostel reveals the depth of his complicity in the patriarchal world. The guests are dancing the Schuhplatteln, Gudrun with the German professor whose ‘semi-paternal animalism’ she detests (WL 411), and Gerald with one of the professor’s daughters, getting her ‘in his power, as if she were a

Women in Love: Death of the Father  133 palpitating bird’ (WL 412). Birkin catches something of the ‘strong, animal emotion’ in the room (WL 411) and, as he dances with Ursula, she is alarmed by the ‘sardonic, licentious mockery of his eyes’ and the ‘animal, indifferent approach’ of his body (WL 412). The echoes of ‘CoalDust’ show how far the contagion of the Konstellation-Vergewaltigung has spread. Birkin’s face glistens as Gerald’s had glistened on his mare at the level-crossing, and Ursula swoons, as Gudrun had swooned, under the spell of a power that feels like ‘black-magic’ (WL 412). Like Gudrun she is fascinated and repelled by what she sees: ‘Her impulse was to repel him violently’, and yet ‘she wanted to submit’ (WL 412). The sado-masochistic drama of mastery and submission must be played out between Birkin and Ursula too. What happens between them is what Frank Kermode calls ‘an act of buggery, conceived as a burning out of shame’.53 Birkin initiates Ursula into anal sex which, to Lawrence, is tainted with the same degrading cruelty towards women that characterises rape; it is sex at its cruellest and most unnatural. In Kermode’s words, it represents ‘the invasion of the genital by the excremental, the contamination of joy by shame and life by death’; it confounds love and hate, creativity and destruction, the ‘river of life’ and the ‘river of darkness’ (WL 172). In terms of the novel’s mythical search for the new age of the Übermensch, this act of anal sex symbolises the harrowing of hell, the breaking of the bonds of nineteenth-century patriarchy. In naturalistic terms, it means, less ambitiously, that Birkin and Ursula have discovered that, so far, their relationship can contain the perverse without being destroyed by it. Birkin’s cruel preoccupation with his male power, like Ursula’s masochistic wish to submit, need not be denied. In Barbara Ann Schapiro’s words, Birkin and Ursula ‘recognise one another in their shameful, bodily selves, and that mutual recognition is their salvation’.54 Luckily as it happens, they can do what Gerald and Gudrun cannot – they can die the death that is in them without incurring their own destruction and, in so doing, begin to live more fully the life that is in them. They can be released from the purgatorial ice and snow of the Alps to head off into the new world of Italy. * Birkin’s struggles against patriarchal images of manhood involve not only Ursula but also the epitome of patriarchal manhood in the book, Gerald. The lifting of Victorian taboos was making homosexuality thinkable in new ways, and in Women in Love Lawrence returns to the homosexual component of bisexuality that he had been grappling with ever since he had first admitted it in himself, tacitly at least, in his letter to Savage of 2 December 1913. In 1915, in a long cancelled passage from ‘The Crown’, doubtless with one aspect of himself partly in mind, he had described the homosexual desires of sensitive, ego-bound modern

134  Women in Love: Death of the Father men as disintegrative, drawing them into experiences that are psychologically regressive and socially and culturally demeaning. Whereas a coarse man will express his contempt for women through rape, the sensitive man finds himself in such a ‘mangled, maimed condition’ that ‘a woman becomes repulsive to him’ (RDP 472). In 1916, in the cancelled Prologue to Women in Love, Birkin too feels homosexual impulses that disable his desire for women, 55 and The First ‘Women in Love’ set out to rescue him from the harmful exclusivity of a homosexuality ‘complemented by the hatred for woman’ (FWL 185). In 1916 Lawrence still believed what he had written in The Rainbow that creativity ‘needs a man and a woman’ (FWL 186), and Birkin’s love for Gerald, like that of Ursula for Winifred, was destructive and regressive, the expression of a decadent age. In the final version of the novel, however, all this changes. Birkin does not exorcise ‘the demons of his homosexual desire’ with Ursula, as Scott Sanders says; he learns over the course of the novel to admit it and explore it. Post-modern critics like Earl G. Ingersoll praise the ‘indeterminacy and fluidity’ of Lawrence’s portrayal of Birkin’s sexuality;56 yet it is always grounded in and shaped by a primary bisexuality. Love for one sex should not entail hatred or exclusion of the other. Like Gross, Lawrence deplored the narcissistic gynophobic homosexuality that he had witnessed at Cambridge and that he embodies here in the ugly, regressive, ego-bound Loerke. There may be widespread oedipal tragedy in the world – ‘the eternal triangle, the trinity of hate’ that Gudrun identifies at the end of the novel (WL 477) – but Birkin wants to establish a trinity of love. ‘“You are all women to me”, he says to Ursula; ‘“But I wanted a man friend, as eternal as you and I are eternal”’ (WL 481). He wants a love that transcends regressiveness and narcissism, that rounds off the awkward corners of the oedipal triangle. Women in Love in its final form is the work of the man who would later tell Trigant Burrow that he had ‘long wanted to know the meaning’ of homosexuality (6L 100), who wrote with astonishing openness on Whitman in 1918–19 in Studies in Classic American Literature and who, according to Maurice Magnus in 1920, ‘revels in all that is not just within his reach. He wants it to be within his reach’.57 It is the work of a man who wanted to discover the creative potential of his own homosexual component in harmonious balance with his heterosexuality. Recent critics have analysed this homosexual element in Lawrence as part of ‘a larger psychodynamic story involving self-deficiency, merging and idealisation’, 58 seeing it as a narcissistic idealisation of a male figure resulting from a childhood dominated by a hostile father and an overpowering mother. Paul Delany, for instance, argued that Lawrence’s fantasy of ‘being held and soothed by a strong, usually older man’ had more to do with ‘his need for security and affection than with any active homosexuality’, and Judith Ruderman agreed.59 Even John Worthen, in

Women in Love: Death of the Father  135 a book that dispels many of the idealisations besetting Lawrence criticism, distinguishes between Lawrence’s ‘attraction’ to men and his ‘desire’ for them: Lawrence, he says, ‘was perfectly fearless in doing what he wanted, and would have acted on his feelings if he had really desired to’.60 Such readings look like idealisations serving to protect a favourite author. Lawrence was much more fearful than such critics allow; but he was not afraid to admit his homosexual impulses on paper, and was ready to generalise them as characteristic of a certain kind of modern man. Women in Love explores the creative possibilities of a bisexuality which he believed had become normal in a world where patriarchy had broken down. Birkin comes to see that his ‘belief in deep relationship between man and man’ (WL 34) ‘had been a necessity inside himself all his life’ (WL 206); and at times even the repressed Gerald recognises it too. Like every other character in the book, Birkin is living out the cultural possibilities of his time. The crisis of manliness was widespread; the question of bisexuality was topical, in psychoanalysis and elsewhere – and, of course, there was the example and teaching of Otto Gross. It is unlikely that Gross was homosexually active in 1907 when he knew Frieda Weekley; but his 1913 essay ‘Anmerkungen zu einer neuer Ethik’ announced his mission, surely well-known to Else Jaffe and her family, of rescuing all modes of human sexuality from the damaging effects of Vergewaltigung. Under patriarchy, he believed, ‘there is always one man pressing down upon another’;61 all contemporary forms of homosexuality are sado-masochistic perversions of an aboriginal bisexuality that has become deformed by bourgeois family-life. He looked forward to a new age when homosexuality would further that empathy with other people’s pain (Miterleben) and joy (Mitfreude) which is the true commonality of life. The perversions born of the lonely oedipal constellations of childhood would be removed, and a harmonious bisexuality would evolve, free from exclusivity and jealousy. ‘The security of a lasting relationship will be guaranteed’, Gross wrote, ‘when the relationship between man and man conforms to that between man and woman, when sexuality is no longer the experience of the solitary person’. In his novel Barbara, Franz Werfel reported these views as he heard Gross express them in 1917–18: One should give oneself tranquilly up to an impulse of desire for one’s own sex. Eros was lord of the earth. All manifestations of the god in Gebhart’s eyes were equally natural. The impulse of man to man, woman to woman, was a release of genuine emotion which should never, therefore, be repressed.62 Like Lawrence, however, Gross felt ‘an unquenchable hatred’ for pederasts,63 and hated homosexuals if they despised women. The evolutionary function of homosexuality was to foster an empathic awareness of

136  Women in Love: Death of the Father how the opposite sex felt; and as Werfel noted, Gross only valued homosexuality in so far as it fostered a bisexuality devoted to women and the feminist cause: No man who had not himself experienced the impulse which made him desirable as a man could be anything but crude and clumsy. It was the homosexual side of his nature which helped him first to understand, and tenderly to respect, a woman’s passion.64 There is a clue that suggests Lawrence had Gross in mind when he created Birkin and, like the doctor from Graz in Twilight in Italy, it is a clue that Frieda and her German family would not have missed. In ‘The Tragedy of an Analyst’, Stekel tells us, Gross enjoyed ‘Japanese wrestling’.65 He seems to be the only person known to Lawrence with this skill; and Lawrence has Birkin learn it in Heidelberg, where Gross first met Frieda and Else. To Stekel Gross’s fascination with Japanese wrestling was an expression of ‘his murderous and fighting instincts’; they fed his parricidal fantasies of becoming the founder of ‘a new realm’, even ‘emperor of Japan’ itself, whilst disguising his unconscious homosexual attraction towards his father.66 But there is no reason to think Gross was unconscious of the homosexual content of his enthusiasm for Japanese wrestling. Probably he was as clear about it as Lawrence was when he used jiu-jitsu in ‘Gladiatorial’ to explore Birkin’s bisexuality, and to imagine a world where ‘the relationship between man and man conforms to that between man and woman’. Birkin first realises his love for Gerald in ‘Man to Man’ when, as he lies ill in bed, Gerald comes to visit him. Sickened by thoughts of the exclusiveness of marriage and the incompleteness entailed by human sexuality, he has been reflecting on the view, shared by Freud, that ‘an originally bisexual disposition has, in the course of evolution, become modified into a unisexual one’.67 He longs for a future when this differentiation will be complete, leaving the man ‘pure man’ and the woman ‘pure woman’, each free from the ‘contamination’ of the other (WL 201). Then Gerald enters, with ‘the warm shelter of his physical strength’ (WL 202), and suddenly Birkin realises the truth of his feelings. ‘Of course he had been loving Gerald all along, and all along denying it’ (WL 206). It is a realisation subversive of the assumptions that underpin bourgeois society, which rests on such denial. His suggestion of a Blutbrüderschaft between them, so different here from in The First ‘Women in Love’, makes his eyes light up with a joy that expresses what Lawrence later calls ‘the odd mobility and changeableness which seemed to contain the quintessence of faith’ (WL 232). It is subversive in itself to define faith in terms of fickleness. Gerald, however, is more reserved, conventional, and draws back; and it is this reserve, this lack of ‘mobility and changeableness’, that locks him into his sado-masochistic love for Gudrun. Like

Women in Love: Death of the Father  137 Peter before Christ, he was, says Birkin in his final grief, ‘the denier’ (WL 480). Birkin had offered him jiu-jitsu and Blutbrüderschaft as a way of sublimating his destructive violence into a relationship that might transcend the battle of man against woman. But Gerald is fated not ‘to admit the unadmitted love of man for man’ (WL 352); he will live out the contradictions of the Konstellation-Vergewaltigung of his society. G.M. Hyde thinks the lack of ‘follow-through’ of homosexual interest in the novel is because it was only ‘a movement of recoil’ from heterosexuality.68 But if we are left at the end of the novel with ‘an unfinished meaning’ (WL 272), it is surely only because Gerald has died. Birkin, though balked in his bisexual adventure, does not renounce it. Peter Balbert has written well of the way that Ursula’s role in the novel is to ‘clarify Birkin to himself’,69 to challenge the redundant complexities of his introverted theorising. But at the end of the novel she finds herself powerless to influence him. His need to love a man offends her, challenging her idea of love, her sense of self. ‘“It’s an obstinacy, a theory, a perversity”’, she says (WL 481); and in Freudian terms she is right, since Birkin’s wish to love both a man and a woman harmoniously together is an attempt to transcend the limitations imposed by the Oedipus complex. James Cowan finds the relationship between Birkin and Gerald implausible: Gerald, he says, is ‘exactly the kind of man an organicist like Birkin (or Lawrence) might be expected to despise’.70 It is wrong to identify Lawrence with Birkin in this way; but Cowan’s criticism raises the same question that perplexes Ursula. Is Birkin’s love for Gerald a genuine response to his otherness, or an expression of Birkin’s own narcissistic injury, his need to find an idealised image of manhood to complement a lack in himself? In the language of ‘The Crown’, is Birkin adrift on ‘the temporal flux of creation’ or ‘the temporal flux of corruption’ (RDP 272)? Is his homosexual component creative or regressive? These questions touch on issues much debated at the time. Havelock Ellis, for instance, thought homosexuality degenerative, whilst Carpenter, like Gross, championed its progressiveness in the fight against nineteenth-century patriarchy. Women in Love remains finally agnostic. Birkin’s bisexuality may be the result of an evolutionary stage of development in which the sexes have not yet properly separated out; it may be the regressive effect of the Decadenceepoche in which he lives; or it may be, as he himself speculates, the expression of a desire with a universal basis in ‘Nature’ (WL 352). The novel hesitates between pathologising and naturalising the homosexual component of his bisexuality; but Ursula harbours no such doubt. ‘“You can’t have two kinds of love”’, she says (WL 481). Birkin dissents, and on that note the book ends. Whether she is right or Birkin, whether she is tainted by patriarchal ideology or whether he by his reaction against it, is part of the ‘unfinished meaning’ of the novel. Birkin is left to live dangerously, sailing in stormy and uncharted

138  Women in Love: Death of the Father waters. He is ‘outside the pale of all that is accepted’ (WL 146) where the boundaries between biology and culture, between masculine and feminine, remain mysteriously blurred, and no known standards apply. This openness of this conclusion in which nothing is concluded emphasises the overlap between what Barbara Ann Schapiro calls ‘narcissistic fantasy and intersubjective recognition’ in human relationships.71 It is not as easy as psychologists and moralists often suggest to separate otherness from projection, the creative from the regressive. Those critics who are sure of what is wrong with Birkin (or Lawrence) might also ask what is right in the challenge he brings to normative thinking of all kinds, including their own. The open end to the novel re-creates the sexual uncertainty of the post-patriarchal world. The indeterminacy of Birkin’s health and the mobility of his desires disrupt some of the binary categories most essential to patriarchal civilisation: those of mental health and sickness, and those of the sexuality which they underpin. Indeed, the concept of bisexuality was itself subversive, an epistemological paradox requiring a rewriting of the categories of sexuality. As Steven Angelides says, ‘bisexuality encompassed the very opposition of sameness/difference necessary for the articulation of a homogenous (hu)man identity erected around distinctions of race, sex/gender, and sexuality’.72 It was precisely the paradoxical uncertainties of this subversive freedom that Gross had signalled in describing the produktiven Decadence of the modern age. In such a period, when new kinds of men and women were evolving, the old categories of health and sickness no longer applied. Only with the passage of time could judgement be formed as to whether new life-modes made for creativity or decadence, and with Women in Love the necessary time-scale is longer than the novel itself. Birkin is what T.S. Eliot called a ‘familiar compound ghost’, created out of many people to explore this new life of adventurous paradox and dangerous freedom that Lawrence was contemplating, and Gross, through his connexion with Frieda, was an important part of the mix. Whereas in Twilight in Italy it was Gross’s idea of political freedom that interested Lawrence, in Women in Love it is his idea of sexual freedom. Like Gross, Birkin imagines a ‘third heaven’ beyond marriage (WL 290); but within this new reine grosse Dritte of free love, it is Gross’s emphasis on the need for the individual to remain true to himself (das Eigene), to resist the Konstellation-Vergewaltigung of bourgeois patriarchy, that most shapes Women in Love. At the end of the novel Birkin resists Ursula’s demand for an exclusive love; he knows that she too is tainted by the will to power, by the Konstellation-Vergewaltigung of her world, and whatever it costs, for better or worse, he is determined to trust to his own instincts, to work out for himself what it means to be a man. He is beginning a search that would preoccupy Lawrence himself in a variety of ways in the years ahead.

Women in Love: Death of the Father  139

VI Analysis and Beyond In his essay ‘Ludwig Rubiners “Psychoanalyse”’ (1913), Otto Gross spelt out his sense of the relative value of the artist and the psychoanalyst. Rubiner had argued that the artist is the true pioneer, the man who alters the ‘Mythologie’ of a society, the general parameters of its selfunderstanding; the rest of society follows a generation later, as Freud has followed Dostoevsky.73 Gross argued in reply that, whilst the revolutionary artist investigates ‘the ultimate questions of the psychology of the unconscious’, only the analyst could find ‘real answers to real questions and the right routes to the right goals’.74 An artist like Dostoevsky – one of his ‘favourite fiction-writers’, says Martin Green75 – sheds light on the problems of the unconscious; but only the analyst can cure them. Lawrence’s view was closer to Rubiner’s: it is the artist who must change the world. The analyst who put his faith in enlightening the ego was, to Lawrence, symptomatic of all that was wrong with his age. ‘The supreme little ego in man hates an unconquered universe’, he thought. ‘The back of creation is broken. We have killed the mysteries and devoured the secrets’ (RDP 281). He would have accepted Karl Kraus’s dictum that psychoanalysis is ‘the illness that pretended to be its own cure’;76 it is the mysteries and secrets of life that hold the key to the future. Tragic art like Dostoevsky’s could not transform the world; though sensitive to changes ‘in the actual living frame of life’, it was powerless to implement them (RDP 381). His novels mark the end of ‘an epoch of the human mind’, but they cannot ‘face out the old life, and so transcend it’ (2L 646). Psychoanalytic language clusters around Lawrence’s efforts to understand an author who was ‘a pure introvert’ (2L 314) and whose novels, ‘mixing God and Sadism’ (2L 521), are ‘great parables’ but ‘false art’ because they create nothing new (2L 544); they lack the mythos of a novel like Women in Love, with its power to activate and corroborate the spontaneous life of the body. It was the analytic self-consciousness of the modern age that Lawrence deplored in both Dostoevsky and Freud; and in a long passage from The First ‘Women in Love’, dating from 1916 though later discarded, Birkin denounced its disintegrative tendency, implicitly including psychoanalysis in his account. However, he adds, there is no turning back: the analytic crisis must be lived through. His words come at the end of what became the ‘Class-Room’ chapter, where he attacks Hermione for ‘conscious sensuality’ (FWL 36), for living in the mirror of her mind until desire, instead of embracing the new, became a self-regarding search for increasingly titillating sensations. And for us, who are going the last steps of self-consciousness, turning our primal instinct into knowledge, making our first spontaneous motions a mental property, for us to cry out upon intellectualism and the mind, that is lying. If we are out on the analytic adventure, we must penetrate the darkest continent. But we might

140  Women in Love: Death of the Father as well know all the time what we are about, and not begin to lie to ourselves. We’ve got to finish the analytic venture, which we have been so proud of up to now – our great science, our great lyrical and emotional epoch has to fulfil itself in us. We’ve got to finish the great analytic adventure, the quest of knowledge. And if we have to push on into the darkest jungle of our own physical sensations, and discover the elements of sensuality in ourselves, we need not pretend we are being simple animals. We are the last products of the decadent movement, the analytic, lyrical, emotional, scientific movement which has had full sway since the Renaissance, and which we’ve been so proud of. Let us know it, and not lie. (FWL 36–7) Although this passage was dropped from the published novel, its concerns survive in Hermione’s hunger for knowledge, in ‘the last subtle activities of analysis and breaking-down’ of Gudrun and Loerke (WL 451), in the sterility of Ursula’s ‘analysing people and their motives’ (WL 305) and also in the endless analyses of Birkin’s own conversation. Lawrence often attacked introspective and analytic thinking in the winter of 1915–16. ‘We must cease this analysis and introspection and individualism’, he wrote to Koteliansky (2L 491). ‘Not always this Criticism and introspection and analysis’, he told Mary Cannan; what he wanted was ‘a new Creative unanimous life’ (2L 485). It was not critical analysis of what was already ‘concluded, in the past’ (WL 86) that mattered but creative experience of what was unknown, in the future. He was wrestling with the same problem that Kierkegaard had expressed in his diary for 1843: ‘It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards’.77 No less than Dostoevsky, Lawrence was a writer, and introspection and analysis were the tools of his trade; he needed to understand backwards, and from this there was no escape. But he also needed to live forwards, recognising the provisionality of his beliefs. In Nietzschean language, he needed faith in his own fictions or, as Vaihinger might have said, to live ‘as if’ (als ob) his beliefs were true. Most people mistake their fictions for objective truths or moral laws, which leads them into falsehood, especially in time of war; but Women in Love is looking for fictions that are not mere falsehoods, and knowledge that is not purely analytic. Hermione’s role in the novel is to embody the anxiety of the epistemophiliac. She is an anachronistic Kulturträger, ‘a leaf of the old great tree of knowledge, that was withering now’ (WL 293). Freud saw the ‘instinct for knowledge’ as ‘a sublimated manner of obtaining mastery’,78 and in Hermione the need for mastery is strong. In the mythos of the novel, it embodies the dying traditions of her class and the ‘manly world’ to which she belongs (WL 16). Even in childhood, in a parody of Nietzsche’s self-surpassing, she forced herself by aristocratic will-power to overcome

Women in Love: Death of the Father  141 the habits of neurotic illness. Like everyone in the novel, she suffers from the sado-masochistic Konstellation-Vergewaltigung of patriarchy. ‘“Oh, it’s impossible”’, says Ursula, ‘“the way she tries to bully one. Pure bullying”’ (WL 50). Even more than Gudrun, Hermione illustrates the masculine protest in the novel. Adler had adapted Vaihinger’s concept of the als ob to describe the ‘world of fiction’ inhabited by neurotics, unable to adapt their fictions ‘towards some practical end’; and as Eder had explained in 1913, one example of this was the masculine protest of the neurotic woman who acts ‘as if’ she were a male.79 If art and fiction enable and enrich, they also disable and impoverish. Hermione lives her life in a series of histrionic fictions, or charades, which cannot disguise her loneliness and lack of ‘natural sufficiency’ (WL 16). Watching Ursula, Gudrun and the contessa in the physicality of their dance, she ‘writhed in her soul, knowing what she could not know’ (WL 92); and this is the paradox of her life that all her knowing cannot restore her spontaneity. Lawrence’s attack on the fetishisation of knowledge and self-knowledge lay at the root of his hostility to the analysis and introspection valued by psychoanalysis. Nothing was to be gained, he thought, merely by drawing morbidity into the light of day. ‘I have known a few analysts, and a few of the analysed’, he wrote later, ‘and I should say the morbidity was increased rather than decreased by the honest daylight’ (PFU 53–4). If dissociated from all that is creative in the bodily self, self-knowledge only breeds perversity, as Gerald shows: “Do you know what it is to suffer when you are with a woman?” he asks Birkin. “She’s so beautiful, so perfect, you find her so good, it tears you like a silk, and every stroke and bit cuts hot – ha, that perfection, when you blast yourself, you blast yourself!” (WL 439–40) It is a wild, extraordinary statement that sums up the sado-masochism of lover, horseman and modernising pit-owner alike, and it epitomises Lawrence’s judgement of his civilisation. The split between conscious mind and bodily unconscious in Gerald and Hermione expresses the dissociation that was the deepest truth of an age that had culminated in the outbreak of the war. ‘“The most normal people have the worst subterranean selves”’, says Birkin (WL 208); they are all, like Halliday, ‘split mad’ (WL 95), and their life ‘goes by contraries, like dreams’ (WL 94). Hermione and Gerald are ‘drowning’ (WL 18), engulfed in the ‘roaring and clattering’ of the sea of their own unconscious (WL 322). This is one of the great shaping metaphors of the book; and it was a diagnosis that psychoanalysis had helped him to reach and that psychoanalysis, he thought, was unable to cure. Gudrun is the character in the novel most sensitive to the fetishistic lure of perverse knowledge. It is experience that she wants, the raw material of her art; she has ‘an insatiable curiosity to see and to know

142  Women in Love: Death of the Father everything’ (WL 234), and abusively she exploits the life of her body for the sensations and knowledge it brings. Envious and unable to get herself into life, she avenges herself on it by observing it, living out the contradictions of her fin-de-siècle creed of life for art’s sake. Meeting Gerald, she feels a keen desire ‘to know this strange, sharp inoculation that had changed the whole temper of her blood’ (WL 22). Lawrence’s metaphor diagnoses Gerald as a disease that has entered her eye (oculus), making her ill in order to increase her resistance against him. Here are the seeds of their sado-masochistic relationship; for she too is ‘split mad’, drowning in the sea of her own unconscious. When she first makes love to him, and he has fallen asleep, she lies awake all night in a lonely vigil during which, like someone drowning, or someone in analysis, she draws up all the memories of her past life in an endless ‘glittering rope of knowledge out of the sea of darkness’ (WL 346). Desperately she clutches at straws of self-knowledge to keep herself afloat amid the general wreckage of her self. Unconsciously she turns to narratives of the past to redeem the present; but it is her tragedy that all her knowledge, like her art, throws her back on the emptiness of the life from which she is trying to escape. Her only course is forward into perversity. Like Hermione, Gudrun suffers from ‘deficiency of being’ (WL 16): she needs to perform in front of an audience to convince herself of her own reality. She reconciles herself to being with Gerald by imagining herself a workman’s wife or the woman behind a captain of industry; but such fantasies are sterile and dissociated, examples of the fantasying that Winnicott described as ‘not contributing-in either to dreaming or to living’.80 Even the playfulness of her art is vitiated by the ‘defensive’ fear which stops her taking herself seriously (WL 95). Her best performance comes in her contribution to the ‘make-belief’ world of the dying Thomas Crich (WL 281). The episode has the force of a mediaeval danse macabre, and increasingly throughout the book her playfulness becomes a grotesque denial of the death-processes in and around her. It reaches its climax in her relationship with Loerke, as the two of them play in polyglot fantasies with figures from the past out of terror of the future. It is a collusive friendship based in shared ‘understanding’ (WL 459); but their knowledge is of ‘things concluded’, and their pleasure lies only in a dissociative search for ‘sensation within the ego’ (WL 452). Underneath everything ‘was death itself’ (WL 467). Gudrun plays pleasurably with the future possibilities of her life only ‘because death was inevitable, and nothing was possible but death’ (WL 468). What draws her to Loerke is the masochistic feeling that he knows her, that he alone can face the emptiness of life with unillusioned courage. But Loerke’s seeing is only a seeing through; he fails to see illusion as a positive force, offering provisional fictions to live by. At the end of the novel Gudrun still has far to go before she reaches the end of herself. She is set on a progressively disintegrative, self-exploitative

Women in Love: Death of the Father  143 course that will take her with Loerke into the radical artistic circles of ‘German Bohemian life’ in Dresden (WL 464) – a Munich without the beer, Loerke calls it. In The First ‘Women in Love’ he is even more expansive: in Dresden there is everything ‘“without the frippery of Paris or the grossness of Munich”’ (FWL 423). This reference to the grossness of Munich, like the reference to the ‘doctor in Graz’ in Twilight in Italy, seems to be a private allusion for Frieda’s benefit to Otto Gross. The Dresden into which Gudrun and Loerke turn at the end of the novel is the countercultural world of Gross and his kind, defined by its antipatriarchal hostility towards ‘people who have their own homes and their own children and their own acquaintances and their own this and their own that’ (WL 464). It was the world which had attracted Frieda Weekley in 1912, and in Women in Love it is a world into which Gudrun sinks without trace. Once in Dresden, we read, ‘she wrote no particulars of herself’ (WL 481). The narrative silence into which she falls expresses the insignificance of the life that she will lead with Loerke – and that Frieda too might have led, in Lawrence’s belief, had he not nailed her nose to his ‘wagon’ (1L 430). In the opposing fates of Ursula and Gudrun at the end of the book, Lawrence offered Frieda his own vision of the two different destinies that had confronted her when she left England with him in the spring of 1912. Loerke is Birkin’s parodic double in the novel. Dedicated to singleness of being amidst bisexual desires, and seeking a new kind of relationship beyond love, he is detached from everyone and everything, recognising no allegiance, ‘absolute in himself’ (WL 452). He seeks self-transformation through an art that sardonically celebrates the power of machinery over men, and through fantasy that derides the self-destructiveness of a self-divided humanity. His art, like that of Dostoevsky, interprets the world but it cannot ‘face out the old life, and so transcend it’ (2L 646); his fantasies originate in a psychic split they cannot heal. Gynophobic and unable to love, he creates nothing new and, in his sterility, he resembles Gudrun who, despite her nostalgia for love, sees it only narcissistically as a stimulus for her art. Within the novel the two of them are ‘the last products of the decadent movement, the analytic, lyrical, emotional, scientific movement’ that has produced the modern world; and their decadence epitomises the Bohemian world to which they turn. Gross held relationship to be sacred, and so too did Frieda and Lawrence. But Loerke and Gudrun have no faith in commitment, and no faith in the creativity of the bodily self; their world is one in which art and experience are increasingly fetishised as the possibilities for creative living wither away. Birkin, however, for all his analytic thinking and awareness of its present necessity, wants a new synthetic ‘dark knowledge’ (WL 319) grounded in the wisdom of the body. It is a wisdom he values because he senses its absence, both in himself and in the world around him. Ursula rightly

144  Women in Love: Death of the Father accuses him of having ‘“so little connection with your own body that you don’t even know when you are ill”’ (WL 196); yet his awareness of this depersonalisation substantiates his love for her. ‘“There is a golden light in you”’, he tells her, ‘“which I wish you would give me”’ (WL 249). Here are echoes of the ‘sunny woman’, in touch with her own body whom Otto Gross had celebrated in Frieda Weekley.81 Birkin’s depersonalisation emphasises one of the central paradoxes of Women in Love: whilst he is so often ill, Gerald and Gudrun enjoy good health. Gerald ‘slept in the subjection of his own health and defeat’ (WL 417), we read, whilst Gudrun attributes her ability to face the truth to her ‘unabateable health’ (WL 465). ‘If she were sickly’, she thinks, ‘she would have illusions, imaginations’. But the sickliness she fears is the source of Birkin’s strength; as Gross had argued, in a sick dissociated culture the most ill man is the most nearly well, and Ursula and Birkin are lucky enough to come through their illnesses. Through sickness and depression they retain connexion with their bodily lives, with ‘the odd mobility and changeableness’ of their moods and desires (WL 232) and with ‘the knowledge which is the death of knowledge’ (WL 319), and this sees them through. Ernest Jones said the aim of psychoanalysis was to promote ‘inner control and self-insight’;82 but what Women in Love values is the capacity for what Gross called ausleben. Lawrence wanted people to act out their desires honestly, to die the death that was in them and to live the life that was in them, without lying or self-deception. It is the capacity of Gerald and Gudrun to realise their deaths that gives them their tragic significance for the present, and the capacity of Birkin and Ursula to realise their lives that gives them their creative significance for the future. In Birkin and Ursula we witness the recurrent struggle between denial and admission; and by writing of denial rather than repression Lawrence is able to leave the barrier between conscious and unconscious processes permeable and unpoliced, open to transgressive material, as when Birkin suddenly realises that he has long been ‘denying’ his love for Gerald (WL 206), or when Ursula suddenly overcomes her instinct ‘to deceive herself’ into thinking her life a success (WL 125). Sometimes self-acceptance comes easily, with what Lawrence, like Nietzsche, calls ‘gaiety’ (WL 207), the badge of a superior soul able to admit experiences that might otherwise destroy it; sometimes it comes with difficulty, driven home by bodily illness or depression. Whilst Gudrun and Gerald are undone by denial, Birkin and Ursula have the grace to accept themselves and their suppressed feelings without being consumed by them, and hence they can live forwards in hope. To live forwards, however, is only possible to them with the help of myth. As Ursula says, partly under Birkin’s influence, she hopes to see the world through in her soul; and this metaphor, or little myth, of self-transformation helps them to survive the habit of introspective, analytical thinking that anchors people in the past, in what Anne Fernihough

Women in Love: Death of the Father  145 nicely calls ‘plot’.83 Lawrence himself uses a similar metaphor to Ursula in the title of his 1917 collection Look! We Have Come Through! Whilst Gudrun would see the world out, stoically, fetishising her experience of it, Ursula wants to see it through in the hope of finding herself in a new place. In Jung’s words, ‘psyche is transition’,84 and transition cannot be accomplished only by analysis of the past; constructive images of the future are needed, drawn out of the resources of myth, art, symbol and metaphor. As Eder put it in 1916, when Lawrence was finishing The First ‘Women in Love’, man can create ‘something in the morrow which is quite unlike to-day’ and imaginatively foreshadow that new creation and relate it ‘to his known experiences by means of symbols’.85 Such ‘subjective creation’, said Jung, ‘means redemption’.86 Gudrun may jeer enviously at Birkin’s longing for the ‘“Blessed Isles”’ (WL 438); but he persists in believing in a place which might be ‘nowhere’ (WL 315) or ‘anywhere’ (WL 356) but where life is ‘sunny and spacious’ (WL 361). Less introverted, Ursula is more practical. Amidst the snow and ice of the Alps, she recalls ‘the dark fruitful earth’ of the south (WL 434). It may be an Italy beyond the imagined reach of the novel; but it is a landscape that images her own hope to her and enables her too, like Birkin, to move forwards with her life. Such moments when a new world is metaphorically glimpsed, or symbolically imaged, embody the aspiration of the novel itself as a creative, redemptive work of art, hostile to the decadent analytical age out of which it sprang. Lawrence’s letters of late 1916 repeatedly contrast ‘creative life’ with ‘death in life’ (2L 636) and, as he told Barbara Low in November, immediately after finishing the novel, psychoanalysis belonged to ‘death in life’. ‘The longer I live the less I like psychoanalysis’, he told her. ‘Depart from evil and do good – I think analysis is evil’ (3L 42). Women in Love was his creative attempt to see through in his own soul a disintegrative culture and a warmongering society. According to its mythos Birkin and Ursula liberate themselves by surviving the Konstellation-Vergewaltigung of their society as expressed in their act of anal sex; they escape the purgatorial landscape of the Alps, where Gerald dies, and travel south to the Promised Land of Italy. In this ‘end-of-the-world’ text (3L 25), their future in Italy remains ‘unrealised’,87 and Ursula continues to challenge Birkin’s myth-making: ‘“we’ve got to take the world that’s given – because there isn’t any other”’, she tells him (WL 315). In Frank Kermode’s phrase, she helps the novel in its process of ‘taming metaphysic by fiction’,88 of scrutinising the value of myth, symbol and fiction itself even in the act of deploying them. By the end of the novel Birkin has adopted some of Ursula’s scepticism in a meditation that challenges the whole founding myth of the novel: ‘The south? Italy? What then? Was it a way out? – It was only a way in again’ (WL 478). The novel does not imagine a new way of life in a new place; it endorses and embodies the hope expressed in mythical impulse and fictional illusion but with a sceptical reserve that emphasises

146  Women in Love: Death of the Father their provisionality. Its creativity lies in the imaginative resourcefulness with which it sees an old world through, and bears witness to the power of art, as opposed to psychoanalysis, in exposing, and perhaps transforming, the sado-masochistic patriarchal structures of its age. * On 23 June 1921, two weeks after the English publication of Women in Love, Lawrence asked his publisher Martin Secker to send a copy of the novel to Frau Frieda Gross, in Ascona. Martin Green is right to think this request ‘no accident’,89 for the novel bears directly on the life of her husband, who had died 16 months earlier from pneumonia brought on by morphine addiction. It shows elements of her husband’s tragedy subsumed into, and surpassed by, a myth of historical transformation that Gross himself would have immediately identified. Its denunciation of the Konstellation-Vergewaltigung of a dominant patriarchal culture and its interest in the emergent culture of a new bisexual man, to use Raymond Williams’s terms, derive from Gross’s ideas and embody aspects of his experience.90 But for all Lawrence’s self-exploratory identification with Gross in Twilight in Italy and Women in Love, for all his slipping in and out of character, he retained his oedipal resistance too. He was sceptical about Gross’s belief in free love and his faith in psychoanalysis: commitment was necessary to relationship, and creativity was necessary to life. Nor did he accept the rationalist basis of Gross’s revolutionary anarchism. The way to deal with the world was to see it through in one’s soul, using the fictive power, the als ob, of the imagination. It is the vision of the artist, and not the theory of the analyst or anarchist, that points the way forward. Lawrence was a Paradies-Sucher no less than Gross and Frieda; but he also knew that all attempts to imagine paradise were provisional and that the real world remained obdurately persistent. Desire and realism interact in a tension that gives the novel energy and integrity. As Mark Kinkead-Weekes says, the peculiar achievement of Women in Love is ‘to hold the apocalyptic in that odd tension with the colloquial’91 so that Birkin can sit at the wheel of his car like an Egyptian Pharaoh, and the dies irae dawn over a venison pasty. It was the firmness of Lawrence’s grasp of this dialectic between desire and reality that saved the thought-adventure of his novel, and the adventure of his life, from the tragic end that befell Gross.

Notes 1 Howard Mills, ‘“Full of Philosophising and Struggling to Show Things Real”: Twilight in Italy’, in David Ellis and Howard Mills, D.H. Lawrence’s Non-Fiction: Art, Thought and Genre, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p.  59; Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 265.

Women in Love: Death of the Father  147



























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Women in Love: Death of the Father  149













































150  Women in Love: Death of the Father 90 See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), Pt. II, ch. 8. 91 Mark Kinkead-Weekes, ‘The Marble and the Statue: The Exploratory Imagination of D.H. Lawrence’, in Imagined Worlds: Essays on some English Novels and Novelists in Honour of John Butt, ed. by Maynard Mack and Ian Gregor (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 401.

5

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious

I Post-Mortem Effects: Studies in Classic American Literature (1918–19) In August 1916, when Lawrence was in Cornwall revising The First ‘Women in Love’, Barbara Low sent him a copy of the July Psychoanalytic Review containing Alfred Kuttner’s review of Sons and Lovers. She also enclosed an offprint of her own essay ‘The Little Commonwealth’, published in the August number of School Hygiene, discussing from a Freudian perspective the experimental community for young offenders set up by Homer Lane in Dorset. Lawrence’s reply was characteristic: he denounced Kuttner, damned Homer Lane and dismissed Low herself for the unconscious meaning behind her laboriously conscientious tone. I hated the Psychoanalysis Review of Sons and Lovers. You know I think ‘complexes’ are vicious half-statements of the Freudians: sort of can’t see wood for trees. When you’ve said Mutter-complex, you’ve said nothing – no more than if you called hysteria a nervous disease. Hysteria isn’t nerves, a complex is not simply a sex relation: far from it. – My poor book: it was, as art, a fairly complete truth: so they carve a half lie out of it, and say ‘Voilà’. Swine! Your little brochure – how soul-wearied you are by society and social experiments! Chuck ‘em all overboard. Homer Lane be damned – it is a complete lie, this equality business – and a dirty lie. (2L 655) You know what I think, Lawrence writes, in a tantalising allusion to conversations vanished beyond recall. Kuttner’s review was the fullest, subtlest account of Sons and Lovers that had yet appeared; it read Lawrence’s text as he himself had read Barbara Low’s, for its conscious and unconscious contents, and it saw the novel as a ‘masterpiece’.1 Why then did Lawrence hate it so much? If his resentment was partly natural pique at being pinned to a theory that claimed to pluck out the heart of his mystery, it nevertheless concealed a serious point. In so far as art is creative, it makes something new

152  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious out of the known. As Birkin says in Women in Love, scientific knowledge is ‘“of things concluded, in the past”’ (86); it is for the artist to apprehend and create that which is new, to create – in Eder’s words – ‘something in the morrow which is quite unlike to-day’. It was this power in himself that Lawrence valued; and in measuring Sons and Lovers by the yardstick of psychoanalytic theory, Kuttner was merely reproducing what was already known. Hence Lawrence’s mocking ‘Voilà’. A novel was not a case-history; its business was to revitalise consciousness by restructuring its reader’s sympathies and antipathies. To use the word he had used with Russell, and that Jung had used before him, art must be constructive; it must revere, and foster, the sympathetic life in people, their capacity for change. In addressing the London Psycho-Medical Society in 1914, Jung had implicitly criticised Freud for developing a Weltanschauung; and Lawrence would echo this criticism later in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious when he accused psychoanalysis of being ‘on the brink of a Weltanschauung – or at least a Menschanschauung, which is a much more risky affair’ (PFU 7). 2 Human life and culture are creative, pregnant with change, and cannot be fitted into the Procrustean bed of any theory, Freudian or otherwise. In 1914 Lawrence had thought psychoanalysis ‘only a branch of medical science, interesting’ (2L 218) but, with the passage of time, he had become more hostile both to its theory and its practice. ‘I can’t help hating psychoanalysis’, he told Barbara Low on returning her copy of the Psychoanalytic Review. ‘I think it is irreverent and destructive’ (2L 659). He chose his adjectives carefully to underline the uncreative sterility of analytical introspection, and targeted them directly at Barbara Low whose endless qualifications and ‘haggling’ over detail got on his nerves (2L 313). Like Ursula Brangwen, she was overfond of ‘analysing people and their motives’ (WL 305). Lawrence had attacked such habits of analysis in The First ‘Women in Love’, countering them with the poetry, symbolism and mythopoeia that were now characteristic of his writing. Healthy living did not depend on introspection but on the ability to exist in creative spontaneous relationship with oneself, with other people and with the natural world. ‘The longer I live the less I like psychoanalysis’, he told Barbara Low. ‘Depart from evil and do good – I think analysis is evil’ (3L 42). The half-truth of psychoanalysis lay in its recognition of the harm caused by repression; but that half-truth became a halflie if it encouraged people to smother their own resources for health in self-analysis. Kuttner had been unable to see the wood for the trees: he had failed to subsume his understanding of illness into a larger vision of health – and this was Lawrence’s concern. Whilst discussing psychoanalysis with Barbara Low and her friends, Lawrence was planning to emigrate to America, immersing himself in American literature and finding it ‘older’ than its English counterpart (2L 645), closer to a new beginning. These two interests in psychoanalysis

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious  153 and American literature coalesced in the winter of 1916–17 in a scheme to write the essays that later became Studies in Classic American Literature, the first in a series of ‘philosophical’ texts that include ‘Education of the People’, ‘Democracy’, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. In their early 1918–19 version, the Studies deliberately set out to construct the larger vision, absent from Kuttner, that would subsume and redeem the half-truth of psychoanalysis. As Lawrence told the American publisher Benjamin Huebsch in 1919, he wanted to enrich Freud’s theory of the unconscious with (ironically) a Weltanschauung of his own. These essays are the result of five years of persistent work. They contain a whole Weltanschauung – new, if old – even a new science of psychology – pure science. I don’t want to give them to a publisher here – not yet. – I don’t really want people to read them – till they are in cold print. I don’t mind if you don’t publish them – or if you keep them back. – I only know the psychoanalysts here – one of them – has gone to Vienna, partly to graft some of the ideas on to Freud and the Freudian theory of the unconscious – is at this moment busy doing it. I know they are trying to get the theory of primal consciousness out of these essays, to solidify their windy theory of the unconscious. Then they’ll pop out with it, as a discovery of their own. – You see Ive told Ernest Jones and the Eders the ideas. – But they don’t know how to use them. (3L 400) Here again are tantalising traces of vanished conversations. The only actual evidence of Eder’s view of Lawrence’s Weltanschauung is a harsh judgement of 1933, ten years after he had renounced Jung and returned to Freud: ‘Lawrence’s view of life as it should be lived was certainly not Freud’s. The retention of the primitive infantile unconscious may lead to the psycho-analyst; unrepressed, it leads to the asylum’.3 In 1919 Eder was doubtless more receptive; but Jones would have seen no need ‘to graft’ Lawrence’s ideas of the unconscious on to those of Freud – and of course it was Jones who, with post-war freedom to travel, had gone to Vienna to see Freud in the summer of 1919. Jones had probably first met Lawrence and Frieda in 1914 through Eder, and he would have discovered a particular connexion with Frieda who was, as we have seen, ‘the bosom friend of Otto Gross’s wife’ with whom Jones had had an affair in Munich in 1908.4 His strongest memories of the Lawrences, however, dated from autumn 1917 when they were back in London and Lawrence was working on Studies in Classic American Literature. Forty years later, what he remembered of Lawrence’s conversation was not his wish to reshape psychoanalytic doctrine but the ‘monologue’ of a man with an ‘obvious lack of balance’, desperate for

154  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious disciples to help him set up a community, presumably that community on ‘the east slope of the Andes’ that he was pursuing with the Eders and others in October 1917 (3L 173). Jones thought the scheme ‘decidedly hare-brained’ and refused to go, presumably giving similar reasons to those adduced by Barbara Low against Homer Lane: the ‘internal disharmonies’ that undermine community life and ‘lead man backwards to the more elemental phases of life’.5 Jones thought Lawrence ‘the last person with whom it would be possible for anyone to co-operate for long’; but he found his company ‘stimulating’ and enjoyed his work, responding to his psychological language and even quoting The Rainbow in a 1918 paper.6 As recently as 1916 Jones had rigorously spelt out the Freudian position on the unconscious, with its sense of the antagonism between primary and secondary processes. The unconscious, he declared, was ‘the part of the mind that stands nearest to the crude animal instincts’, making the individual ‘a selfish, conceited, impulsive, aggressive, dirty, immodest, cruel and egocentric animal, inconsiderate of the needs of others, and unmindful of the complicated social and ethical standards that go to make up a civilised society’.7 Lawrence disagreed. He thought rather that it was the complicated social and ethical standards of ‘civilised’ society that made people cruel and egocentric, and led them to devalue and pervert their desires. Writing to Catherine Carswell in July 1916, using an antithesis resembling Gross’s distinction between das Eigene and das Fremde, he stated that people need ‘to fulfil sacredly their desires’ in lives ‘unhampered by things which are extraneous’: What we want is the fulfilment of our desires, down to the deepest and most spiritual desire. The body is immediate, the spirit is beyond: first the leaves and then the flower: but the plant is an integral whole: therefore every desire, to the very deepest. And I shall find my deepest desire to be a wish for pure, unadulterated relationship with the universe. (2L 633–4) Every new desire is a new creation, an inspiration arriving out of the unknown of our bodies; and it was this sense of a creative bodily unconscious, opening on a future forever new, that crystallised what Lawrence wanted to contribute to psychoanalysis. Mark Kinkead-Weekes thought Lawrence ‘megalomaniac’8 for imagining Jones and Freud would plagiarise his ideas; but his fear betrays the depth of his hope that his ideas might be welcomed as a necessary revision of psychoanalytic theory. Charles Rycroft has pointed out the difficulty Freud incurred by extrapolating his model of the sick mind to account for the mind in health. The idea that ‘the primary processes are unconscious, primitive, neurotic, archaic and in normal people subject to repression’ caused

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious  155 psychoanalysis problems, he argued, because of the obvious similarity ‘between the imaginative activity displayed by artists and writers and the primary processes described by Freud as characteristic of dreaming and neurotic-symptom-formation’.9 Clearly it was absurd to conclude that all dreamers and artists are neurotic. Rycroft’s solution, which he placed in the tradition of thought going back to the Romantic poets, was to discard the Freudian view of the antagonism between primary and secondary processes and to propose an intrinsic harmony between them, ‘one providing the imaginative, the other the rational basis of living’.10 Lawrence would have agreed, and perhaps Eder too at that time. For reasons both personal and cultural, Lawrence prioritised the unconscious processes of the body over the conscious processes of the mind, and valued art as the expression of the bodily unconscious in its imaginative mode; it is to the elaboration of this belief that Studies in Classic American Literature is devoted. The fact that whilst exploring many of the typical concerns of psychoanalysis – repression, sublimation, the symbolism of dream, myth and art – the Studies are surprisingly uncritical of Freud provides added confirmation that, in 1918–19, Lawrence hoped to build a bridge between his own psychosomatic model and that of psychoanalysis, to incorporate Freudianism within his own more inclusive scheme. It was the inevitable disappointment of this hope that would make his subsequent ‘philosophical’ writings increasingly hostile to Freud. * It was Jung’s ideas as well as Freud’s that Lawrence wanted to subsume under the new thinking of his Studies. What he had learned about Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido in discussion with Eder and Barbara Low had fed into The Rainbow and Women in Love, and he was still thinking about it in June 1917 when he met Eder again in London. Eder was then working with shell-shocked patients at a London neurological clinic and, according to Lawrence, his life ‘seemed at a crisis’ (3L 150). He was having sexual difficulties, perhaps to do with potency, his wife was in love with Ernest Jones, and he was toying with ideas of going to Palestine with the Zionist Commission and also to the Andes with Lawrence. ‘There will be Frieda and I, and Eder and Mrs Eder, and William Henry and Gray, and probably Hilda Aldington and maybe Kot and Dorothy Yorke’, Lawrence declared (L3 173). He and Eder were very close at this time, as we can see from the letter Lawrence wrote him on 24 August 1917 about Mme Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, which he had just been reading: I should like to talk to you also about the lunar myth – the lunar trinity – father – mother – son, with the son as consort of the mother,

156  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious the magna Mater. It seems to me your whole psycho-analysis rests on this myth, and the physical application. And it seems to me this myth is the mill-stone of mill-stones round all our necks. (3L 150) Lawrence saw the story of Oedipus as the founding myth of psychoanalysis, whether in Freud’s original form or in Jung’s revision of it, and it was this myth that he wished to revise. The fact that Eder’s life was at a crisis – ‘as it is with me’, Lawrence added, ‘and with most folks, probably’ (3L 150) – was only exacerbated, he said, by an oedipal myth that had become ‘the mill-stone of mill-stones round all our necks’. The chapter from Mme Blavatsky that Lawrence wanted to discuss was ‘The Moon, Deus Lunus, Phoebe’, which interpreted the modern Christian image of the Virgin Mother and Child as a disguised variant of the old pagan figures of the Magna Mater and her son, her sexual consort who was sent to earth each spring to die in order to renew the world. Its picture of a dominant female and subservient male, ambiguously positioned between son and lover, must have intrigued Lawrence; and he would have noted too the incestuous implications that Blavatsky found in the sacred Christian icon of mother and son. But even though her esotericism offered a weapon against the Victorian idealisation of motherhood that had bedevilled his boyhood, and against the myth of the Oedipus complex that was bedevilling his maturity, both esoteric and Christian images of mother and child occluded the manhood of the male entirely; it is not surprising that Lawrence, who increasingly since 1913 had been struggling for a masculine independence within his marriage, should resist them. The very fact that in 1917–18 he was writing philosophy and literary criticism, not fictions about sexual relationships, belonged to his desire to separate himself out from Frieda; and so too did the critique of Freud whom, according to H.D., Frieda continued to admire. ‘Lawrence was instinctively against Sigmund Freud, Frieda was intelligently for him’, she wrote, reflecting back on the winter of 1917–18, and Frieda’s version of psychoanalysis, she made clear, was still that of Otto Gross, who had told her that ‘“if love is free, everything is free”’.11 It was a powerful belief, focussed in 1907–8 on the health-giving power of Frieda herself, and it was from this powerful Magna Mater figure, from what H.D. called his own ‘great goddess-mother idea of her’, that Lawrence was struggling to free himself.12 Even the new conceptualisation of homosexuality that comes as the culmination of the Studies is a response to this need to claim a new, separate masculine identity. What Lawrence was resisting was a regressive desire to merge with Frieda; the boundaries in his marriage needed to be shored up by greater mutual awareness of each other’s otherness. This is why, as Judith Ruderman says, the devouring mother, the Magna Mater, presents such a ‘formidable figure’ in the Studies.13 Through Jung Lawrence had come

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious  157 to feel that he had a quasi-incestuous dependence on Frieda and, in his essays on Fenimore Cooper and Poe, he generalised that regressive personal desire into a theory of cultural decline. ‘A race falls’, he wrote, ‘when men begin to worship the Great Mother, when they are enveloped within the woman, as a child in the womb’ (SCAL 227). What he found in nineteenth-century American literature were the final stages of a decadence, as yet incomplete in himself and in European culture, that had been caused by excessive dependence on women. The heroic masculine response to this decadence, he argued, was to do as Deerslayer does: to remain true to one’s own singleness even into death. ‘In him there is no succumbing to the woman, the Magna Mater of his shame’ (SCAL 228). In the following essay on Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, Lawrence confronted the condition of those who fail to attain such independence. The relationship between Roderick and Madeleine Usher, he argues, is not primarily one of sibling sexual desire; their incestuous feelings flow from an earlier desire to merge with other people. The sexual desire is secondary upon the failure to achieve singleness of being, a failure encouraged by a Christian culture that, as evidenced in the icon of Mother and Child, overvalues love as identification with the beloved. In psychoanalysis almost every trouble in the psyche is traced to an incest-desire. But this will not do. The incest-desire is only one of the manifestations of the self-less desire for merging. It is obvious that this desire, for merging, or unification, or identification of the man with the woman, or the woman with the man, finds its gratification most readily in the merging of those things which are already near – mother with son, brother with sister, father with daughter. But it is not enough to say, as Jung does, that all life is a matter of lapsing towards, or struggling away from, mother-incest. It is necessary to see what lies at the back of this helpless craving for utter merging or identification with a beloved. (SCAL 236) Lawrence’s criticism of Jung is identical to that levelled against Freud in September 1916 to Barbara Low. Whether Freudian or Jungian – and the Studies make nothing of the distinction between them – psychoanalytic ideas like the ‘Mutter-complex’ are half-truths only, unless set within the context of those bodily and cultural relationships which determine how human beings live their lives. The Studies set out to describe these relationships, to disclose the biological basis of the desire for independence and thus to enable psychoanalysis to know itself in a new way, with the mill-stone of its obsessive interest in incest lifted from round its neck. *

158  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious The ‘new science of psychology’ that Lawrence recommended to Huebsch in the Studies, under which he wanted to subsume the halftruths of psychoanalysis, rested on his understanding of what in ‘New Eve and Old Adam’ he had called the ‘physical soul’. This oxymoron is, in Rosalie Colie’s phrase, an ‘epistemological paradox’,14 designed to make us reconsider the ordinary categories of our thinking; it highlights the unity of human beings and the non-conformability of the different discourses through which we seek to understand them. Lawrence wanted to reconcile science and religion, to suffuse knowledge of the biological basis of life with the religious reverence he thought it deserved. Bodily life, he believed, was inherently emotional, and he described it indifferently as either conscious or unconscious. To describe it as conscious highlighted the ways that emotions are ways of knowing the world, whilst to describe it as unconscious highlighted the mysterious workings of the body out of which those emotions emerge. Such emotions, the Studies argue, constitute the primal consciousness on which our mental consciousness is raised: All thought, and mental cognition is but a sublimation of the great primary, sensual knowledge located in the tissues of the physique, and centred in the nervous ganglia. It is like the flowering of those water-weeds which live entirely below the surface, and only push their blossoms, at one particular moment, into the light and the air above water. (SCAL 241) Sublimation in psychoanalytic theory describes the unconscious deflection of libido into socially useful patterns of behaviour, but Lawrence uses the term to emphasise the etherealisation of the richly sensual and emotional life of the body as it passes into mental consciousness – a mental consciousness that was necessary to a full life but secondary to the bodily life that sustained it. Like Santayana, Lawrence thought mental consciousness ‘the expression of bodily life and the seat of all its values’;15 more precisely, he thought it a federation of different modes of bodily consciousness. The way in which he mapped these different modes upon the body, his ‘psychic geography’ as Daniel Dervin dubs it,16 is well-known, and can be briefly summarised here. He divided the body vertically into front and back, and horizontally into upper and lower, and mapped different modes of consciousness on each zone. The consciousness of the front part of the body was of love or attraction, whilst that of the back was of hatred or resistance; the consciousness of the upper part of the body registered those feelings spiritually, the lower sensually. Each part of the body, each muscular potential, must be fully used; what was important was the balance between them, between body and mind, between

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious  159 relationship and independence, between what Gross’s essay ‘On the Symbolism of Destruction’ (1914), grappling with the same topic, calls the drive to relate (Anschlusstrieb) and the will to preserve one’s individuality (Willen zur Erhaltung der Individualität).17 Lawrence’s quarrel was with those who thought consciousness only mental, ‘in’ the brain. What is omitted from such a view is that consciousness is always consciousness of something, that it is always emotionally charged and that this emotional charge is experienced as dispersed throughout the different parts of the body. William James had made a similar point in The Principles of Psychology when he argued that, contrary to common sense, the bodily manifestations of an emotion precede its mental awareness: ‘the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful’.18 We perceive an object in the outer (or inner) world, neurological impulses pass to and from the brain, and we react with bodily responses that, in their turn, create an emotional state. Emotion is ‘the feeling of a bodily state’19 and, without such bodily states, emotions would be void of content. James’s view is one to which contemporary neurologists still subscribe. In The Feeling of What Happens, Antonio Damasio portrays emotion and consciousness as neurologically interdependent aspects of our regulatory resources of adaptation and survival, and argues that emotions ‘use the body as their theater’. 20 In his later book Looking for Spinoza he offers a brief catalogue of writers who, from Spinoza onwards, have fought against the mind-centred rationalism of Western culture by insisting on the primacy of emotional life, 21 and Lawrence would merit a place on his list. It was above all the spontaneity of bodily life that Lawrence valued, and in the ‘philosophical’ writings of 1916–21 the word came to occupy a special place in his vocabulary. Repeatedly the Studies celebrate the ‘spontaneous emotion or gesture’ (SCAL 230) arising unconsciously out of ‘the mysterious body of life’ (SCAL 175). It is an emphasis that occludes the role played by culture in authoring, and authorising, our emotions, and it idealises the body in a way that Lawrence would have quickly condemned in anyone else. What is at stake is how we punctuate the narrative of our emotional life, of where we say that desire and hatred start. We might argue that desire and hatred are always desire and hatred of something, that they are essentially reactive and best thought of as relationships. But Lawrence, though well aware of desire in its relational aspect, privileged the spontaneity of the body because he was engaged in a passionate polemic against a mind-centred age, and a passionate struggle with himself to lay hold on the liveliness of his own body. It was this struggle that drove his criticism of Freudian psychoanalysis. The antagonism that Freud found between primary and secondary processes produced a therapy designed to strengthen the ego against an

160  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious anarchic unconscious. Self and society needed defence against desire. But for Lawrence, as for Gross, it was desire that needed defence against the external pressure to conform, a pressure that quickly became internalised within the ego. To Gross such conformity resulted in the loneliness and alienation of bourgeois society; to Lawrence it resulted in perversion and feelings of unreality. The battle-lines were between the spontaneous life of the body and the repressive powers of the mind, and both men saw Freudian psychoanalysis as an agent in that repression. Freud’s belief in the antagonism of primary and secondary processes, his faith in the ego, were historicised and identified as one more expression of the late nineteenth-century bourgeois culture that had alienated men and women from their own bodily desires. Interestingly, towards the end of his life Freud too suspected his ‘partisanship for the primacy of the intellect’ and his ‘hostility to the id’ had reduced the range of his sympathies and diminished his interest in life;22 but it was not until the 1950s that psychoanalysis found its way towards the values that Lawrence held dear when Donald Winnicott, in language close to Lawrence’s own, focussed on the damaging effects of compliance on creative living and the importance of ‘the spontaneous gesture’ to the process of personalisation, of feeling real as a person inhabiting a ‘body ego’. 23 It was his sense of the conflict between the creative life of the body and the demands of social morality in nineteenth-century America that gave Lawrence the key to its literature. Blake had thought Milton ‘of the Devil’s party without knowing it’, 24 and so too, Lawrence believed, were the American writers of the nineteenth century. They were split between desire and convention; repression had so damaged them that their creativity was fulfilled only in visions of disintegration and destructiveness. Their desire, through long denial, had grown perverse, manifesting its vitality only in a series of ‘post-mortem effects’ generated out of the death of their integral self (SCAL 148). It was an unconsciously duplicitous art, ostensibly moralistic but actually disintegrative, and the methodology that Lawrence evolved to read it was to study it against the grain, identifying the perverse vitality of unconscious desire beneath its surface of conscious morality. It was a methodology he eventually epitomised in his famous dictum from the 1923 version of the Studies: ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale’ (SCAL 14). This hermeneutic of suspicion, reading art as psychobiography, uncovering the unconscious illness behind the conscious aim, is akin to the practice that Freud began with the publication of Delusion and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ in 1907; and however indirectly, Freud is more likely to have influenced Lawrence’s own search for unconscious symbolism than the ‘occult reading’ suggested by Mark Kinkead-Weekes. 25 In this sense the Studies are, as Anne Fernihough has said, ‘one of the earliest examples of an extended work of psychoanalytic criticism’, 26 and their language engages directly with psychoanalysis, as when Lawrence

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious  161 declares that desire may produce either liberating fulfilment or punitive repression. It is the ‘vindictive repression of the living impulse, the utter subjection of the living, spontaneous being to the fixed, mechanical, ultimately insane will’, he says (SCAL 174–5), that has undone American art and made the American artist duplicitous, splitting ‘the wakeful man and moralist who sits at the desk’ from the ‘somnambulist’ who writes ‘in the spell of pure truth as in a dream’ (SCAL 168–9). Deliberately Lawrence offers his Studies as dream-interpretation, a Traumdeutung that with wonderful versatility unravels the vicissitudes of instinctual life under the repressiveness of social life. From the mechanical Franklin, who apart from occasional untidiness seems scarcely to have an unconscious at all, to the death-haunted Whitman, Lawrence traces in order of increasing severity a variety of dissociative illnesses that characterise American life. It is not the creativity of the art that concerns him, though he is quick to praise good writing when he finds it; it is rather the kinds of perverse creativity that he discovers, and their symbolic meaning for the history of his time. Looked at in this light, the Studies is a collection of case-histories detailing the most typical pathological conditions of the age; like Women in Love, their concern is to trace ‘incipient newness within the old decadence’ (SCAL 167). This newness, he says, lies in the liberating life of the old Indian America to which the writers unconsciously respond in their desires; and although they respond to that life only to repress it, their failure points the way towards the necessity of a future reconciliation. In Gross’s language, the Studies show how the ‘Decadenceepoche’ of the present is simultaneously the ‘Mutterschooss der grossen Zukunft’, the womb of a great future. 27 * The Studies develop Lawrence’s second dual instinct theory and, as in ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’, the theory is substantiated by the development of an elaborate mythical framework. The universe began, we are told, when the aboriginal creative reality divided itself into fire and water; then, as with the developing embryo, this one fundamental division repeated itself over and over again in a long series of divisions, culminating in those between male and female and, in human beings, spiritual and sensual. These divisions and sub-divisions are conceived as polar opposites, emphasising the importance of ‘balance within the self’, 28 the role of conflict and the recognition of otherness within human relationships. Such dualism, Lawrence states, is corroborated by contemporary science which asserts ‘the universal law of polarity’ in cosmology and psychology alike. Indeed, he adds, such knowledge is ‘the very beginning of psychology’ (SCAL 204). Late nineteenth-century biology had polarised the instincts of self-preservation and of sexual reproduction, and psychoanalysis had done the same with ego instincts and sexual

162  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious instincts; Lawrence’s aim was to subsume this established scientific tradition into a broader religious view of the polarities of the universe and their implication in questions of human balance and relationship. The cosmogeny of Studies is presented as an enabling myth, a postulate ‘to fix a starting-point for our thought’ (SCAL 260), and Lawrence traces its origins to bodily desire, seeing it as a safeguard against the overvaluation of spirituality that led Poe and Whitman and Jung towards the merging of incestuous desire. ‘The primary or sensual mind of man expresses itself most profoundly in myth’, he states (SCAL 242). Historically, the passional side of human nature found its first fulfilment in myth, then in legend and romance and, most recently, in art, where the life of the passions comes closest to admitting the demands of reason. Over the same period the rational side of human beings has turned increasingly to science for fulfilment, and the nearest approach of reason to our passional life is philosophy. The combination of ‘philosophy’ and myth in Studies thus embodies Lawrence’s best effort to achieve ‘harmony between the two halves of the psyche’, to create ‘a pure unison between religion and science’ (SCAL 243). This is the subjective meaning of his wish to subsume psychoanalysis under his own vision. He wanted to marry the two halves of his own nature, to renew on behalf of his own culture the harmony enjoyed in prehistoric times when ‘science and religion were in accord’ (SCAL 260). Deliberately he flouted the materialism of nineteenth-century biology. It is not true, he writes, that inorganic matter preceded organic life: inanimate matter was itself initially formed out of the dead bodies of living creatures – life had always come first and the material world had always been, literally, a world of death. As he told Cynthia Asquith in 1915: ‘my feet are more sure upon the earth than you will allow – given that the earth is a living body, not a dead fact’ (2L 431). The ‘materialisation and emptiness’ of modern life (SCAL 262), with its barren view of nature, needed the enlargement of a ‘new, if old’ religious vision that could re-establish ‘vital relationship, direct connection with life at every point’ (SCAL 289). The cognitive mode of that vision is symbolism; and at the start of the Studies Lawrence acknowledges that, in discussing symbolism, he is engaged in the same enterprise as psychoanalysis, working towards ‘a universal system of symbology’ (SCAL 169). ‘Practically the whole of psychometry and psycho-analysis’, he adds, ‘depends on the understanding of symbols’. In keeping with his letter to Huebsch, and in pursuit of his wish to subsume psychoanalysis under his own wider symbolic scheme, he restricts open criticism of Freud to those popularisers who read sex into everything. All interpretation of symbols, including his own, involves a ‘process of reduction’ (SCAL 169) but, as Jung had already argued, ‘to give the sword a necessary phallic reference, as some of the popular symbologists do today, is false and arbitrary’ (SCAL 244). More broadly, Lawrence had already expressed his general scepticism about

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious  163 the ‘critical, analytical process’ in The First ‘Women in Love’ (FWL 36), and he returns again to this in his essay on Poe. Analytic inquiry, he says, expresses ‘the supreme lust of possession’, a craving ‘to be scientifically master of the mystery of the other being’; yet the knowledge acquired by such bullying epistemophilia is ‘never more than a post-mortem residuum’ (SCAL 232). Strictly speaking, it is impossible ‘to reduce myth or legend to one consistent rational interpretation’ (SCAL 242), ‘to analyse and possess and know the secret of the soul, the living self’ (SCAL 232). The spontaneous aliveness of life is always beyond analysis, somewhere new, looking ahead in order to restore a lost balance to the mind, both internally and in its relationships with the external world. The cosmology of Studies also provided Lawrence with a mythical framework within which to reconceptualise the ideas explored in ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ about the balance required by human bisexuality, 29 an issue that became particularly urgent in Cornwall in 1917 when his own homosexual desires were at their sharpest and his dread of the Magna Mater at its most intense.30 Frieda acknowledged this when she told H.D. that autumn: ‘Lawrence does not really care for women. He only cares for men. Hilda, you have no idea what he is like’.31 The early versions of the Whitman essay, at the climax of the Studies, express for the first time Lawrence’s intellectual willingness to embrace homosexual relationship as a vital reality in its own right, free from the taint of perversion. Only the 1919 version of this essay now survives; and in it, surpassing Whitman’s preoccupation with merging by invoking the biological situation of the anus at the base of the spine – the centre of resistance and singleness, in Lawrence’s scheme – he imagines the homosexual congress of men who remain proud and independent even in the moment of their connexion. It was a connexion familiar to ‘the esoterics and the priest-hoods thousands of years before Plato’ (SCAL 365), a polarisation beyond anything known between man and woman: It is a relation of two stark individuals, equal in their pure oppositeness or duality. They are balanced stark and extreme one against the other, beyond emotion, beyond all merging, existing in the last extreme of mutual knowledge, almost beyond feeling, so deeply abstracted or concentrated. They are balanced on the edge of death: and their relationship is the root of greatest life and being. (SCAL 366) This curious idealisation of life flourishing at the edge of death, of creativity and destructiveness perilously juxtaposed at the last port ‘of egress and ingress’ (SCAL 366), suggests that Lawrence felt himself on dangerous ground; his conception of relationship here seems fraught, a defence against the ontological threat of otherness. The impersonality of bodily desire has become depersonalised, idealised out of its cultural

164  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious history and sequestered from the psyche-soma, remote from any possibility of harmonious or conflictual connexion with it. Yet there is an admission here too. Behind the fantasy lies a confessional note that provides the last word to both the essay and the Studies as a whole: ‘I, being what I am, salute you, Whitman, before any other man, because I owe the last strides into freedom to you’ (SCAL 369). In context, Lawrence might be celebrating either the discovery of free verse or free homosexual desire; but the two unite in his need to be true to the spontaneity of the emotional life. * If Lawrence really believed, as he told Huebsch, that psychoanalysts were ‘trying to get the theory of primal consciousness out of these essays, to solidify their windy theory of the unconscious’, he was wrong. The Studies elicited almost no response from the psychoanalytic community, and for this Lawrence is partly to blame. If he had confined himself to a celebration of the True Self grounded in spontaneous gesture and a condemnation of the False Self grounded in compliance, he might have written an accessible book easily assimilable into the British Romantic tradition as it extends, say, from Wordsworth to Winnicott. Such a plain account of the creative bodily unconscious might have found influential readers amongst those writers and journalists who, in the last years of the war, became interested in Freud, and it might have attracted analysts too. Eder, for instance, with his New Age connexions, joined one postwar group centred on Orage whose purpose was to make psychoanalysis conformable with their high valuation of artistic creativity and religious truth. Yet despite the fact that Lawrence’s ideas closely anticipate the future concerns of British psychoanalysts, it was to Jung, not Lawrence, that they turned. The truth is that Lawrence’s theoretical writing in these years was neither plain nor accessible. He had not only been talking to Ernest Jones and the Eders in 1917–19; he had been reading books by James Morgan Pryse and Madame Blavatsky, and was drawn to their esoteric claims on behalf of ‘a body of pure thought, kept sacred and clean from the herd’ (3L 143). The Studies respond to this reading, and their talk of chakras, the Rosy Cross, the pineal body and so on, must have deterred many readers when the first eight essays appeared in the English Review in 1918–19. They still deter today; the temptation is to dismiss them as physiological nonsense, to demythologise and transmute them into metaphor in the spirit of Wittgenstein’s remark that ‘the human body is the best picture of the human soul’.32 Yet their bizarreness remains. Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Lawrence has ‘kicked himself loose of the earth’ upon which most of his readers live; he has deserted the common cultural ground that enables discussion. Even Eder, whose

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious  165 views of ‘man’s ultimate psyche’ had differed from those of Freud and Jung in 1914 and who – perhaps because of his Fabian background – was sympathetic to theosophy, would surely have been put off by such oddly unscientific writing. Why was Lawrence so attracted by esotericism? What drew him to the diffusionism that was becoming fashionable again in contemporary anthropology and provided the basis for esoteric thinking?33 When he wrote Studies, Lawrence was poor and living in isolation, his best work unpublishable; he loathed the war, and his health separated him from the men who were fighting it, whilst his wife Frieda seemed to him a ‘devouring mother’. It was a time of depression, of ‘wintering’ (3L 197), and it is not hard to imagine how, in his search for masculine self-belief, he might set out to recover ‘a body of esoteric doctrine, defended from the herd’ (3L 143), with himself as arch-priest. Whilst Freud had the scientist’s hope of building up a new body of knowledge, Lawrence shared the esoteric’s dream of reconstituting a lost knowledge that, like the body of Osiris, had been scattered round the globe in ancient times, and remained accessible only through the study of old religious beliefs, rituals and symbols. The lost body he sought was, in one important sense, his own. Read psychologically, the Studies hark back to the whole-body emotions of childhood, subsequently repressed by a rationalist puritanical civilisation; read culturally, they hark back to prehistoric communities of religious belief, long since dispersed by economic and technological developments. They are not, however, elegiac; Lawrence was ‘not a theosophist’ and, despite his depression with its tinge of paranoia, he knew there was no going back, ‘even to the wonderful things’ (3L 143). His esotericism expressed his wish to find a present way to live more fully in a living world. It was a wish that, widespread as it is, is frequently the wish of an adult who as a child has had a depressed mother. Some critics have written well about Lawrence in this way,34 and Winnicott has summarised the burden that children must carry when their primary task is ‘to be alive and to look alive and to communicate being alive’.35 To refer Lawrence’s liveliness to his family history is not to deny its authenticity; it was as obvious to those who knew him personally as it is to those who read him today. But to recall his childhood hypersensitiveness towards his mother is to remember the depth of his need to ward off her depression, and the toll this took upon him. Always his liveliness was marked by an intolerance of deadness in others that was also a fear of deadness in himself. There is a moment in St. Mawr when Lou Witt reacts to the resplendent life of her horse with such mixed feelings as Lawrence himself must often have felt: He stands where one can’t get at him. And he burns with life. And where does his life come from, to him? That’s the mystery. That

166  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious great burning life in him, which never is dead. Most men have a deadness in them, that frightens me so, because of my own deadness. (SM 60–1) It was this struggle between the quick and the dead, between liveliness and depression, that animated Lawrence’s art, his satire and his religious feelings, and that, in 1918–19, gave him such an eye for the life and post-mortem effects in nineteenth-century American literature. Lawrence knew the publication of his amateur ‘philosophy’ risked ridicule but nonetheless, he told Gordon Carswell, ‘read the essays and see if you find anything in them’ (3L 278). This is the challenge of the essays: ‘see if you find anything in them’. Tacitly Lawrence criticises psychoanalysis for its irreverence and destructiveness in evacuating the world of religious meaning, for reducing the great stories that people have told themselves about the world – myth, legend, romance, drama, art – to mere neurotic symptoms. Jung criticised Freud for practising a psychoanalysis that was not constructive, and that did not help his patients to live more fully; now Lawrence was criticising them both for the same thing. Where Freud pathologised religion and Jung psychologised it, Lawrence set out to resacralise it. If his esoteric beliefs, like many private belief-systems and many modernist grand narratives, leave the reader sometimes at a loss to ‘find anything in them’, they also underpin a literary and social criticism, even a ‘new science of psychology’, that do leave the reader with much to find. Indeed, in extending the conceptual framework of psychoanalysis to include a relational awareness of health, spontaneity and creativity within the psyche-soma, the Studies are 50 years ahead of their time. But Lawrence had not yet had his say about psychoanalysis. He may have told Edith Eder, as he was finishing the essays in May 1918 that ‘my strenuous repudiation of psycoanalysis (sic) is gone. It’s one of the ways, as you say – and where it leads to isn’t my affair’ (3L 245); but he would soon make it his affair again, in a much more critical spirit, and once again it was the question of incestuous desire that provoked him.

II Incest Avoidance: Jung, Trigant Burrow, Lawrence (1918–20) Late in 1918, whilst still busy with the first version of his Studies, Lawrence read what may well have been his first psychoanalytic text, Barbara Low’s copy of Jung’s Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, translated by Beatrice Hinkle as Psychology of the Unconscious. It had been lent him by Kot, and the fact that he immediately forwarded the book to Katherine Mansfield suggests the stir the book was causing amongst his friends. His accompanying letter of 5 December spells out candidly what he thought incestuous in his marriage to Frieda. It is a remarkable document,

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious  167 a warning that quickly becomes a confession, resonant with Jung’s sense of incestuous desire as a cowardly and destructive mode of regression: Beware of it – this Mother-incest idea can become an obsession. But it seems to me there is this much truth in it: that at certain periods the man has a desire and a tendency to return unto the woman, make her his goal and end, find his justification in her. In this way he casts himself as it were into her womb, and she, the Magna Mater, receives him with gratification. This is a kind of incest. It seems to me it is what Jack does to you, and what repels and fascinates you. I have done it, and now struggle all my might to get out. In a way, Frieda is the devouring mother. – It is awfully hard, once the sex relation has gone this way, to recover. If we don’t recover, we die. – But Frieda says I am antediluvian in my positive attitude. I do think a woman must yield some sort of precedence to a man, and he must take this precedence. I do think men must go ahead absolutely in front of their women, without turning round to ask for permission or approval from their women. Consequently the women must follow as it were unquestioning. I can’t help it, I believe this. Frieda doesn’t. Hence our fight. (3L 301–2) Lawrence is always quick to run with new ideas, to test their durability by living them out, and here, in updating Katherine Mansfield about his oedipal drama, he expresses his scepticism about psychoanalytic incesttheory whilst revealing what he had found useful in reading Jung. His approach is cultural, not scientific: he sees his situation as historically, not biologically, determined, and hence his distrust of the idea of incest as a universal explanatory concept. Furthermore, he thinks relationally: his situation involves two people – it is a folie à deux, a collusive relationship, historically determined and culturally sanctioned, between a regressive man and a motherly woman (Gross’s mütterliches Weib). It is only within this cultural, relational context, unusual in contemporary psychoanalysis, that Jung’s idea of incest helps him understand what has gone wrong between Murry and Katherine Mansfield and between himself and Frieda. Both he and Murry need justification and approval from the women they love: they lack the independence to take rightful precedence over them, and it is the spinelessness of this dependence that yields up ‘a kind of incest’. Following Jung and qualifying his language carefully (‘in a way’, ‘as it were’, ‘a kind of incest’), Lawrence identifies in his relationship with Frieda a regressive sexualised reactivation of vestigial childhood feelings: he ‘casts himself as it were into her womb’ where, like the Magna Mater, she receives him ‘with gratification’. His struggle to cure himself is increasingly urgent, transforming itself from the wish for ‘balance within the self’, seen in the first version of the Studies, into

168  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious a masculinism preoccupied with fantasies of male power and leadership, seen for instance in the 1921–22 version of the Whitman essay. It was a struggle that entailed upon him a critique of the psychoanalysis that saw incestuous desire as a universal component of the Oedipus complex and masculinism as a symptom of oedipal disturbance. Lawrence refers directly to Jung twice in the Studies: once in writing about Poe, as we have seen, criticising Jung’s idea of ‘mother-incest’ (SCAL 236) for its lack of historical and cultural context (a reference that, if stimulated by his 1918 reading, must have been inserted during final revision) and again in the 1919 Whitman essay where he accurately defines Jungian libido as ‘spiritual vital energy’ (SCAL 358). In preparing this latter essay for publication in September 1919, Lawrence had further reason for thinking of Jung. Even before Jones had left for Europe in August 1919, immediately after the end of the war, Jung had been in London. Eager to re-establish contact with the ablest of his disciples, he had arrived in July, hoping to spread the new ideas he had developed during the war. ‘It seems impossible to grow flowers without weeds springing up’, Jones commented sourly.36 Jung gave three lectures and, as Deirdre Bair says, lavished great care on their preparation, adapting them carefully to their various audiences.37 On 11 July he spoke ‘On the Problem of Psychogenesis in Mental Disease’ to the Psychiatry Section of the Royal Society of Medicine. This was a paper targeted at physicians, offering several case-studies to highlight the importance of the psychological factor in the causation of illness. The following day, at a symposium on ‘Instinct and the Unconscious’ hosted jointly by the Aristotelian Society, the Mind Association and the British Psychological Society, he gave a more subtle presentation, distinguishing between instincts, intuitions and other energies of the unconscious, which he divided into a personal and a collective part. It was here that he first used the term Archetypus to illustrate the way that the collective unconscious of mankind is programmed to perceive the world, and he cited in evidence the symbolism of myths, dreams and fantasies common to cultures everywhere. He had spoken about the collective unconscious too at the first lecture he had given, eight days earlier, on 4 July at 5.30 in the afternoon, at a public meeting organised by the Society for Psychical Research, held at the Royal Society of Medicine in Wimpole Street. His topic had been ‘The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits’, and he had traced the origin of such beliefs to apparitions, dreams or mental illnesses in which complexes become detached from the ego and take on their own autonomous life. In primitive peoples the collective unconscious irrupts in a disturbing sense of the presence of spirits, and the personal unconscious in a therapeutic sense of the healing powers of the soul. He concluded by refusing to say whether he believed in spirits himself; his aim, he said, was to approach the question purely from a psychological or scientific perspective.

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious  169 Lawrence, however, did believe in spirits. He believed that the spirits of the dead continued to haunt the living, and had said so the previous February, writing on Fenimore Cooper; ‘all our efforts’, he wrote, ‘will not win from our souls a belief in disembodied spirits which cluster innumerable in the invisible ether’ (SCAL 206). Clearly the topic of Jung’s lecture would have interested him; and there is reason to think he went to hear it. At the start of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious he asks rhetorically: ‘Have we not seen and heard the ex cathedra Jung?’ (PFU 7) The natural interpretation of this question is that he himself had heard him speak or at the very least was well acquainted with those who had, and if he is not alluding to the similar opportunity of five years earlier, the lecture of Friday 4 July is the obvious candidate. Lawrence had been living in Berkshire since 25 April, but on 3 July, keen to go abroad, he had come to London for five days to apply for passports. He stayed with Barbara Low that night and the following night at her rooms in Guilford Street in central London, and she would have been the ideal companion with whom to go to hear Jung speak; her rooms were within easy access of both the Passport Office and the Royal Society of Medicine. It is true that, in a note to Eddie Marsh of 4 July, he said London made him so sick that he could not go out that day; but maybe the mood passed. He was back in Berkshire the following Monday, so had no opportunity to hear the two later lectures. The likelihood that he had been to hear Jung is increased when we consider that the first page of his Whitman essay not only describes the horse as a symbol of spiritual energy ‘like Jung’s libido’ (which he might have known from Transformations and Symbols of the Libido) but also describes its rider as an ‘archetype of the human soul’ (SCAL 358). An unusual word for Lawrence, this may well have been used in discussion following Jung’s lecture. Although Lawrence later declared his ambivalence about Jung by calling him ‘very interesting, in his own sort of fat muddled mystical way’ (5L 540), he would have recognised that Jung too was trying to graft something important on to what he had learned from Freud. He would have been sympathetic to his belief in a therapeutic, creative unconscious, his recognition of the value of symbolism and religion and his belief in the regressive origins of incest. Hence, when, sometime in 1919, he came across the work of one of Jung’s pupils, the maverick American analyst Trigant Burrow, it is not surprising that he read him too with sympathy – and once again it was the question of incest that caught his eye. * Burrow’s essay ‘The Origin of the Incest-Awe’ appeared in the American journal The Psychoanalytic Review for July 1918 but, given the war-time difficulty of transatlantic postage, it is likely that Lawrence first encountered the article sometime in 1919 when, Burrow recalled, ‘a

170  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious student of mine interested him in some of my earlier writings’.38 It was an essay that, when he came to write Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, Lawrence praised as ‘brilliantly true’ (PFU 11), and at its heart lay Burrow’s neo-Jungian critique of Freud’s ideas about incest. Burrow had first met both Freud and Jung in the summer of 1909 when they were in America lecturing at Clark University, and within the month he and his family had set sail for Europe so that he could spend the next academic year studying under Jung at the Burghölzli. This was just 18 months after Jung’s mutual analysis with Gross, and the structural similarities of thought shared by Gross, Jung and Burrow may well, as Gottfried Heuer has mooted, 39 derive from that time. On his return to America, Burrow helped found the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1911, and only the threat of war in 1913 interrupted his plans to undertake an analysis with Freud. Repeatedly over the next 15 years he declared himself a loyal supporter of Freud; yet his analytic papers tell a different story. In 1917, in ‘Notes with Reference to Freud, Jung and Adler’, whilst claiming to agree ‘unequivocally’ with Freud,40 he elaborated on a long-held belief in a presexual mode of infantile consciousness, which he called the ‘preconscious’, a belief derived from Jung but idealised out of all recognition by Burrow;41 and it was this idealisation of the spontaneous creativity of the infantile preconscious that underlay his disagreement with Freud’s views of incest. What mattered to him, as to Gross, was the feeling that ‘flows from within out’ (das Eigene), and he deplored the repressive potential of what ‘flows from without in’ (das Fremde).42 The characteristic mode of the infantile preconscious, Burrow thought, was one of presexual love, of ‘harmoniousness and unity’ and, surviving into adulthood, it was to be distinguished from the selfish covetousness of sexual desire by ‘the social merging of personalities into each other in the pursuit of the common good’.43 This was Burrow’s answer to the question that lay at the heart of all Jung’s thinking: ‘How am I to be creative?’ In celebrating the ‘tranquil quiescence’ of infancy,44 however, Burrow ignored its passionateness; he decried the aggressive and possessive instincts, and would have rejected Winnicott’s view, so close to Lawrence’s own, that ‘if the real basis is creativity the very next thing is destruction’.45 Infancy for him was a Garden of Eden from which the consciousness of covetous desire would inevitably expel the growing child. ‘We think that repression is the result of sex’, he says, but no: ‘Sex is the result of repression’. I believe that when child-life shall be permitted to develop naturally and joyously, its growth unfolding simply from the harmonious setting in which life has its inception, we shall have gone far toward mitigating the driving, obsessive mania that now, whether covertly or frankly, is universally accredited under the name of sex.46

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious  171 This is a long way from Freud and, in 1925 Jones called him, not without reason, ‘very vague and muddle-headed, far more Jungian than Freudian’;47 and it is true that his difficulties with self-expression seem to betray an inarticulacy deeper than mere awkwardness with words. In the years when Lawrence first read him, he was undergoing a personal crisis, which eventually led him to develop a psychoanalysis like that of a puritanical American Otto Gross, seeking to recover within adult groups something of the shared paradise of infant happiness that had been destroyed by a pathogenic adult culture. It was, moreover, as we shall see later, a culture whose life-denying moralistic demands were reinforced by the authoritarian, individualistic structures of psychoanalysis. The argument of ‘The Origin of the Incest-Awe’ rests on this antithesis between the contented plenitude of the infant’s preconscious and its unhappy fall into self-consciousness. The incest-taboo (Inzest-Scheu), says Burrow, is neither simply instinctive nor socially conditioned; it originates in the biological incompatibility between the subjective consciousness of an infant united with its mother and the objective consciousness which we learn to turn upon the world and upon ourselves. The mode of the former is spontaneous creativity, harmony and love, and that of the latter is wilful desire and covetousness. We are torn by an ‘organic contradiction’ between these two modes,48 which Burrow variously calls those of the pleasure-principle and the reality-principle, feeling and reason, poetry and science, love and sex. It is when we look back with adult consciousness at our infantile feelings that, with horror, we invent the idea of incest as an explanatory account of them. As Daniel Dervin observes, this is ‘a virtual inversion of psychoanalytic instinct theory’;49 desire does not shape our minds, our minds shape our desires. ‘There is no incest but thinking makes it so’, Burrow says; Inzest-Scheu epitomises the evolutionary truth that ‘Nature abhors consciousness’.50 Our revulsion at the idea of incest is ‘the innate abhorrence of the primary affective sphere of consciousness toward the ruthless incursions of an alien objectivity’, 51 and it exemplifies the perversity of all our social morality which is merely a failed attempt at compensation for the outrage suffered at the encroachment of self-consciousness upon our aboriginal happiness. Burrow’s argument bypasses ideas of gender and the family constellation altogether; the role of the father, in particular, so central to Freud, is never mentioned. But it would appeal to Lawrence for its praise of pristine spontaneity, and for its hostility towards the overvaluation of the mind and self-consciousness so characteristic of our civilisation. * Whom did the sons of Adam take to wife? Like an unappeased spirit, the problematic of incestuous feeling haunts the stories of our beginnings. In Freud’s case the problematic had been embodied in the paradoxical

172  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious category of infantile sexuality, which enabled him to unite the continuities and discontinuities between infantile and adult experience within a common language. By developing an extended category of sexuality which did justice to the depth of childhood feeling and the variety of adult experience, Freud was able to locate incestuous feeling within the child’s attachment to its mother, and explain the child’s aversion from such feelings (Inzest-Scheu) by the forbidding presence of the father. It was the idea of these feelings that was repressed. Jung disagreed. He saw the idea of incest as the regressive construction of an adult in flight from life, and thought that, at its most productive, it was the symbolic expression of a psychological wish to be reborn by the mother so that the challenges of life might be met and overcome. Freud identified at once what was missing from this dyadic account – the presence of the father, symbolically murdered in the silence of Jung’s text. He sent Jung an offprint of the first part of Totem and Taboo, called ‘The Horror of Incest’, and followed it up with a letter: ‘What I still fail to understand is why you have abandoned the older view and what other origin and motivation the prohibition of incest can have’.52 Jung recognised that Transformations and Symbols of the Libido had treated the question of incest ‘very vaguely’, and had failed to provide an adequate, specifically psychological account of the origins of Inzest-Scheu.53 Burrow’s paper too, seeing it biologically as ‘the protest of our organic morality’, fails similarly.54 It is easy to read these heterodox accounts, like that soon to be given by Lawrence in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, from a Freudian perspective as denials of the oedipal constellation; certainly the ablation of the father-imago is marked in the writings of Jung, Burrow and Lawrence at this time. But even whilst Freud clung to his own vision that ‘the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex,’55 he sensed that his fate was to be superseded. Consciously or unconsciously, despite itself, Totem and Taboo implies the recurring need to murder the aboriginal father of psychoanalysis, so that future generations of analysts can grow up and, inspired by a ‘creative sense of guilt’, 56 develop new views of the world. Jung, Burrow and Lawrence were all driven to create their own views of the world, though none of them would have attributed that need to the creative guilt of parricide. With their emphasis on the dyad of mother and child, they were pursuing a different account from Freud of the origins of creativity and mental illness. It is not enough to accuse them of oedipal denial, though such a charge may contain truth. Freud’s oedipal narrative did not command their assent because their own difficulties and solutions lay elsewhere. One way to describe this is to say that none of the three had succeeded in reaching the oedipal stage unharmed. Lawrence challenged Freud partly because he knew that, like Paul Morel, his difficulties stemmed from earliest infancy, if not before; and when in Psychoanalysis and

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious  173 the Unconscious he turned to explore the theoretical ground of those difficulties, he reconsidered in detail the question of incest that he had touched upon in Studies in Classic American Literature.

III Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1919–20) Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious was written in Italy, between December 1919 and January 1920, and shows a new hostility towards psychoanalysis: evidence of Lawrence’s new-found distance from his English analytic friends and also perhaps of his failure to influence Freudian theory. No doubt the post-war popularity of psychoanalysis provoked him too. Already in 1917, according to H.D., ‘the late warintellectuals gabbled of Oedipus across tea-cups or Soho café tables’, 57 and as Dean Rapp shows, such comments spread rapidly in the popular press. In 1919, Everyman was reporting that interest in psychoanalysis was ‘growing by leaps and bounds’, whilst a year later the Saturday Review complained that Freud’s books were a popular dinner table topic to be ‘discussed over the soup’.58 Lawrence’s own remark in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious was clearly fashionable itself: ‘The Oedipus Complex was a household world, the incest motive a commonplace of tea-table chat’ (PFU 7). He remained grateful to psychoanalysis, he said, for revealing the pathological potential in inhibiting ‘true passional impulses’ (PFU 13) but, unlike Studies, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious did not seek to complement analytic theory but rejected it altogether. Even the title of the book reads like an attempt to supersede Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious. Its central argument – that the sense of creative living originates in the spontaneous activity of the different centres of the body in balance with one another, and in balance with the same centres in other people – picks up where the Studies left off, and elaborates their vision. There is no need to recapitulate what has already been said about Lawrence’s belief in the ‘biological psyche’ (PFU 132)59; what is new and interesting about Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious is its brief fierce attack on the moral tendency of psychoanalysis. Lawrence’s own moral scheme rests on a study of the relationship between mother and child that denies infantile sexuality and the oedipal theory of incest. Like Burrow, he argues that the infant achieves inner balance by first finding balance in its relationship with its mother. ‘The essence of morality’, he writes, as though morality were exclusively a matter of personal relationships, ‘is the basic desire to preserve the perfect correspondence between the self and the object, to have no trespass and no breach of integrity, nor yet any defaulture in the vitalistic interchange’ (PFU 27). He differs from Burrow, however, in his sense of what that correspondence entails; for Burrow sees love as a form of merging and disregards the instinctual interchange of hatred and anger altogether. From a Lawrentian standpoint, he imposes the repressive

174  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious idealism of the upper self on the desires and aversions of the lower self, spiritualising desire and debilitating the urge towards independence, and Lawrence will have none of it. Taking his terms from Burrow, he calls the upper self objective and the lower self subjective, and criticises his age for forcing an objective morality on subjective desires and aversions that exist ‘beyond criticism or moral judgment’ (PFU 11). The business of morality is to respect these emotions. It was not until Winnicott, a generation later, that a psychoanalyst would celebrate the fierce innate morality of the child whose hatred and anger, in relationship with its mother, resist all attempts to make it ‘comply at the expense of a personal way of life’.60 Winnicott, however, differed from Lawrence in seeing maturation as a long process of learning to tolerate a certain loss of spontaneous liveliness in order to adapt to the demands of family and, later, of civic society. He recognised the mixed nature of moral life, where rights and duties mix in what Burke called ‘a sort of middle’.61 Lawrence rarely made any such concession and, in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, was able to avoid doing so, as Susan Thornham observes, by virtue of ‘his concentration upon the development of the infant psyche’.62 The polemical fierceness of his adult morality was in line with the fierceness of the child whose bodily life he wanted to subsume into his own. His default position when thinking about the passionate life (though not always when thinking about civic life) was to ground what ought to be in what is, seeking only intrapersonal and interpersonal balance, and judging morality primarily from what Max Weber, talking about Gross, irritably called a ‘nervenhygienischen Standpunkt’.63 It is the hubris of psychoanalysis that Lawrence targets, its transformation into a Menschanschauung, a key to all mythologies, a universal psychology rather than a psychotherapy. This same process had been noted by Jung when discussing the Oedipus complex in his 1912 Fordham lectures: ‘the incest complex’, he wrote, ‘was not a special complex of neurotic people; it proved to be a component of the normal infantile psyche’,64 and therefore could never be a sufficient cause of illness. Lawrence adopts the same shape of argument, perhaps taking it from Eder who had translated the Fordham lectures. Psychoanalysis began, he says, in the belief that complexes were the neurotic result of repression and would disappear as soon as they entered consciousness. But this did not happen, he adds, because the most basic complex of all, the Oedipus complex, turned out not to be the result of repression but the manifestation of normal sexuality. Only one conclusion can be drawn from this, says Lawrence, and in a bizarre history of the psychoanalytic movement, he proceeds to draw it. The only way for people to recover from a neurotic illness is to act out the desires whose repression makes them ill; and since those normal desires include ‘incest-craving’, people must be encouraged to practise incest. This is the secret belief of the psychoanalytic community, Lawrence concludes, with a seriousness of tone that prevents our

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious  175 taking it as the satirical reductio ad absurdum it might at first appear to be; incest is the unadmitted end to which ‘every analyst must, willy-nilly, consciously or unconsciously, bring his patient’ (PFU 11). The preposterousness of this argument shows just how little Lawrence knew of Freud. The amateurishness of his approach shows at its worst here, and David Ellis’s strictures about his neglect of the ‘logical sequence and accuracy of information’ demanded by the ‘discursive mode’ of such writing are fully justified.65 He makes no effort to take the measure of Freud’s intellectual outlook: his distrust of desire, his guarded faith in the ego, his belief in the inevitability of human self-division, his stoical appreciation of civilisation, his wry conviction that the great issues of happiness and morality exist ‘in a kind of middle’ and, crucially, his understanding of sublimation. This was a concept widely misunderstood at the time by analysts and non-analysts alike. Barbara Low defined it as ‘the diverting of the original energy connected with primitive impulses, especially the sexual instinct, into fresh directions’66; but, crucially, it was an unconscious process. May Sinclair, who was informed about psychoanalysis, failed to realise this in her ‘Clinical Lectures on Symbolism and Sublimation’ of 1916,67 and so too did Lawrence.68 He thought it a therapeutic process which defused repressions by raising them into consciousness and ridiculed it as a mystic phrase full of ‘charm’ but without meaning (PFU 9). Otto Gross was also sceptical about sublimation, albeit on more informed and political grounds than Lawrence. He had grounded his ‘new ethic’ in the biological hygiene of the body and the revolutionary need to act out desire, and it was surely his philosophy of ausleben, retailed by Frieda, that pointed Lawrence towards his grotesque conclusion about psychoanalysis and incest. Certainly Gross was in his mind for, in the opening chapter, he invokes him, anonymously, as ‘one of the first and most brilliant of the analysts, a man now forgotten’ (PFU 10) and, like Lawrence himself, a believer in the physical basis of mind:69 He fully realised that even the psyche itself depends on a certain organic, mechanistic activity, even as life depends on the mechanistic organism of the body. The mechanism of the psyche could have its hitches, certain parts could stop working, even as the parts of the body can stop their functioning. This arrest in some part of the functioning psyche gave rise to a complex, even as the stopping of one little cog-wheel in a machine will arrest a whole section of that machine. This was the origin of the complex theory, purely mechanistic. (SCAL 10) Gross’s concern was for the neurological harm caused by repression, and Lawrence’s awareness of this suggests that his own interest in the

176  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious nervous system after 1917 may owe something to the man whose son he had pretended to be in Twilight in Italy. The esoteric neurology of the Studies and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, we might say, belongs to the continuing attempts of the ‘son’ both to identify with and surpass the ‘father’. Lawrence’s differences from Gross – his esotericism, his distrust of consciousness and the psychoanalytic ego, his celebration of hatred in relationship, his wish for commitment in sexual love, his masculinism – all constitute a subtext to a book that, like Twilight in Italy, is shaped by his ongoing oedipal conflict with him. His strategy in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious is to see the supposed permissiveness of psychoanalysis towards incest as proof of a more general aim to ‘do away entirely with the moral faculty in man’ (PFU 8). ‘We have got our moral values all wrong’, he declares (PFU 27), and psychoanalysis is part of the problem, not the cure. It is wrong, first of all, because in focussing on the illnesses of the repressed unconscious, it ignores the health latent within the unconscious centres of the body. Second, in supposedly promoting incest, it neglects the need for intrapersonal and interpersonal balance between these different centres, which is the true business of morality. Third, in its therapeutic effort to raise buried feelings into consciousness, it undermines the unconscious bodily self and overvalues the mind, and fourth, in universalising incestuous desire as a fact of human psychology, it ignores the importance of culture and suppresses the human capacity for self-transformation. Lawrence’s rejection of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex, shared with Jung and Burrow, was not, however, a denial of the reality of incestuous desire; but like Gross, Lawrence believed such desire originated in parental seduction, with the child’s sexuality prematurely provoked by ‘conscious-passional suggestion from the mother’ (PFU 29). It did not belong inherently to the ‘spontaneous unconscious’. In June 1920, in ‘Education of the People’, still rejecting ‘any thrilling Freudian motive’ (RDP 121), he elaborated on the harm done to the psychosomatic integrity of a child by a mother who sets out to make it conscious where it should be unconscious, personally responsive where it should be impersonal: She succeeds, and starts this hateful “personal” love between herself and her excited child, and the unspoken but unfathomable hatred between the violated infant and her own assaulting soul, which together make the bane of human life, and give rise to all the neurosis and neuritis and nervous troubles we are all afflicted with. (RDP 126) Such behaviour exemplifies the ‘hateful self-tickling self-abusive affair’ that relations between adults and children have become in the modern world (RDP 126).

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious  177 Nor did Lawrence shy away from exploring the realities of adult incestuous desire, in tones that have the ring of personal confession: a man finds it impossible to realize himself in marriage. He recognizes the fact that his emotional, even passional, regard for his mother is deeper than it ever could be for a wife. This makes him unhappy, for he knows that passional communion is not complete unless it be also sexual. He has a body of sexual passion which he cannot transfer to a wife. He has a profound love for his mother. Shut in between walls of tortured and increasing passion, he must find some escape or fall down the pit of insanity and death. What is the only possible escape? To seek in the arms of the mother the refuge which offers nowhere else. And so the incest-motive is born. All the labored explanations of the psychoanalysts are unnecessary. (PFU 13–14) Lawrence’s impatience here with ‘all the labored explanations of the psychoanalysts’ reminds us that in his biological psyche, there is no room for a strictly psychodynamic aetiology. He is not interested in the complex mapping of infantile fantasy or identification that, according to psychoanalysis, goes to form the adult character. Lawrence’s sense that such explorations were ‘labored’ suggests that, for all his esotericism and hostility to science, his thinking had been shaped by late nineteenth-century scientific traditions of biology and psychology that were out of sympathy with the new dimension of subjectivity opened up by psychoanalysis. ‘The incest motive,’ he says, following Jung and Burrow, ‘is in its origin not a pristine impulse, but a logical extension of the existent idea of sex and love’ (PFU 12). It is an adult conclusion based on adult experience, a regressive rationalisation creating the desire it has dreamt up, a violation of the innocent body of the child by guilty adults, forcing present ideas back upon their childhood in retrospective self-justification. It is an attempt by the human reason to ‘save itself’ (PFU 14). He knew enough of oedipal debate to know that his rejection of ‘the incest motive’ entailed on him an account of the origin of Inzest-Scheu in adults. It came, he said, out of the repression caused by ‘moral and perhaps biological fear’ (PFU 10), an argument he found in Burrow who also saw the fear of incest as ‘primary and biological’, ‘the protest of our organic morality’ against the violation of childhood love by adult desire.70 Incest and psychoanalytic incest-theory were two sides of the same coin, deductions of the human reason that betray the deep sanity and rich balance of bodily life in its relationships; and it was this sense of betrayal that drove Lawrence to make the immorality of psychoanalysis his central theme in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. Strikingly, however, for all his talk about relationship, Lawrence’s picture of family-life remains dyadic; there is no mention of the father in

178  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, nor any recognition of the way that each relationship within a family is simultaneously a relationship with every other family member. Such omissions must have been obvious to an analytic reader, and they invite oedipal interpretation. The absence of the father, it might be said, signals an unresolved oedipal conflict, leading the son, in order to save the world, to seek out the magical weapon of an esoteric biology with which to belabour the oppressive patriarchy of his day; he is engaged in a Vaterbekämpfung which fails to assimilate paternal authority and jibs at the mixed nature of human morality. Such a view may be not without truth, though it should not detract from the subtlety of the relational thinking condensed into this brief study of mother and child. Lawrence himself, of course, was well aware of his unfinished business with the father, as Fantasia of the Unconscious shows.

IV Fantasia of the Unconscious (1921) There is, as Evelyn Hinz says,71 a ‘significant difference’ in both content and style between Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and its successor Fantasia of the Unconscious. The sequence of proposed titles for the new book provides the clue. Lawrence began in June 1921 with the working title of ‘Psychoanalysis and the Incest Motive’ (3L 730), which quickly became peripheral to the book itself. Its first version, it seems, completed by the end of June, began by dismissing Freud’s limited view of the unconscious, as Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious had done, and ended by rejecting his view of dreams; otherwise, psychoanalysis was barely mentioned at all. Even the two central Chapters IX and X, on ‘The Birth of Sex’ and ‘Parent Love’, only mentioned it once in passing, to praise its ‘great service’ in drawing attention to the reality of incestuous desire (PFU 145). Lawrence’s first working title was more appropriate to the book he had just finished, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, than to the book he was about to begin; the particular engagement with Freud that now seems characteristic of Fantasia of the Unconscious probably began to emerge only at the start of October with the addition of new pages at the start of Chapter I (PFU 66–7) and a new conclusion to Chapter IX (PFU 134–41). Lawrence’s next title, ‘Child Consciousness’ (4L 82), also seems closer to Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious than to the final Fantasia. A third title emerged during the October revisions, however, ‘The Child and the Unconscious’ (4L 93), re-establishing the book as a critique of Freud and psychoanalysis. It was a title too that echoed the two short essays by Eder and his wife, ‘The “Unconscious” Mind of the Child’ (1914) and ‘The Conflicts in the Unconscious of the Child’ (1916), written in the belief, shared by Lawrence, that ‘the mental system of the child must be respected; it is not to be judged by the adult standard’.72 This

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious  179 title gave way to ‘Harlequinade of the Unconscious’ (4L 97) and then, in mid-October, to Fantasia of the Unconscious (4L 103), the term ‘fantasia’ being intended ‘to prevent anybody tying themselves into knots trying to “understand” it’ (4L 109). This new title invoked the mixture of ‘formality and spontaneity’73 of the musical fantasia, anticipating the bagginess and playfulness of Lawrence’s text whilst simultaneously superseding the Freudian idea of fantasy. Also, it predisposed its reader to accept Lawrence’s view of creativity as a fundamental power in its own right, not to be referred back to the sublimated energies of repressed sexuality. ‘The sexual impulse, in its widest form, was a very great impulse towards the building of the Panama Canal’, Lawrence wrote. ‘But there was something else, of even higher importance, and greater dynamic power’ (PFU 67). This ‘something else’ was what the Eders had called ‘the fundamental human instinct of creation’74 and what Fantasia calls ‘the essentially religious or creative motive’. This motive, he wrote, ‘is the first motive for all human activity. The sexual motive comes second’ (PFU 67). With this, Fantasia of the Unconscious had discovered its theme, its angle of attack upon Freud. This distinction between the sexual and creative instincts had first been drawn by Jung in 1912, in his Fordham lectures, where he had argued that, during evolution, libido had gradually freed itself from exclusively sexual ends: Although there can be no doubt that music originally belonged to the reproductive sphere, it would be an unjustified and fantastic generalisation to put music in the same category as sex. Such a terminology would be tantamount to treating of Cologne cathedral in a text-book of mineralogy, on the ground that it consisted very largely of stones.75 Lawrence uses this same example of the cathedrals, as he had already in The Rainbow, to make a similar point about human creativity: ‘Was the building of the cathedrals a working up towards the act of coition? was the dynamic impulse sexual? No. The sexual element was present, and important. But not predominant’ (PFU 67). Yet there is an important difference between Lawrence’s argument and Jung’s: for Lawrence the sexual and creative instincts are not only discrete but also in ‘great conflict’ with one another (PFU 67). Here was a dual instinct theory to rival that of Freud, and it was this argument that gave shape to Fantasia of the Unconscious. There is a new tone in Fantasia that embodies its vision of creativity. Mark Kinkead-Weekes noted Lawrence’s intensified ‘imagination and play of idea’, his ‘increased intransigence towards his readers’ and his ‘new readiness to appear in the text in person’,76 and he attributed them to the hurtful reviews of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. David

180  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious Ellis disliked the new style and found Lawrence’s jokey, acerbic addresses to the reader ‘uneasy and unsuccessful’, a ‘failed experiment’ grounded in ‘radical uncertainty’ about his potential audience.77 But Lawrence is deliberately uneasy, uncivil; imitating eighteenth-century satirical writing, he is closer to Swift than to Fielding. There is a spontaneity, says Winnicott, ‘which has destruction as its next-door neighbour’,78 and Fantasia relishes this destructive element as an essential aspect of its creativity; the new is brought into being only by destroying the old. Lawrence has found a literary manner – ‘engaging’ and ‘hard-hitting’, John Worthen calls it79 – that embodies this destructive urge and, with a flounce of his pen, he is ready once more to lay waste the ‘dark groves’ of psychoanalysis (PFU 69). Fittingly, Lawrence begins with a creation myth, celebrating the power of his own destructive creativity as he ridicules the Weltanschauung of contemporary religion and science, including that of psychoanalysis. Jauntily he plays at God within the universe of his text. ‘In the beginning’, he intones like a latter-day St John (PFU 69), and launches on his own ‘gay and gospel truth’ (PFU 70) to prove that things began not with the Word but with Life or, more accurately, with a living creature, out of which the worlds of life and death were born. As Evelyn Hinz says, if Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious is scientific in its presentation, Fantasia of the Unconscious is structured ‘according to the pattern of myth’;80 for it is myth, not science, that conceptualises the deepest, subjective truths of life. ‘We refuse any Cause’, Lawrence writes, ‘whether it be Sex or Libido or Elan Vital or ether or unit of force or perpetuum mobile or anything else’ (PFU 67). Freud may want a cause; but ‘Freud is with the scientists,’ Lawrence goes on and, by way of riposte, he produces a creation myth that celebrates the non-sexual origins of creation. He attacks Jung too for dithering between the competing claims of science and religion. It is the unpredictability of the religious motive alone that matters, the wonderfulness of what men may make. Life is ‘incalculable’, he wrote in TS1 (PFU 246). William James too had stressed the importance of the ‘incalculable’ in the living process.81 ‘There is no cause for the religious impulse’, says Lawrence (PFU 67). It transcends knowledge, surprises science and outfoxes expectation; it is this playful incalculability that Lawrence embodies in the eccentricity of his myth and the quirky digressive waywardness of his prose. * Lawrence’s attack on what he mistakenly took to be the pansexualism of psychoanalysis was in line with most English criticism of Freud. ‘When Freud makes sex accountable for everything he as good as makes it accountable for nothing’ (PFU 67), he says: sexuality is central to our lives, but ‘a sexual motive is not to be attributed to all human activities.

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious  181 We know it, without need to argue’ (PFU 66). He instances ‘greed’ (PFU 66) as a non-sexual motive, echoing Jung who so often invoked the hunger instinct in criticising Freud. Many other writers agreed. Rivers, for one, said that the dream was ‘just as little determined solely by motives arising out of sex as motives of this kind are solely responsible for the morbid processes of psycho-neurosis and for the products of artistic and religious activity’.82 Lawrence also aligned himself with most of Freud’s English critics in rejecting infantile sexuality. ‘It is obvious’, he wrote, ‘there is no real sexual motive in a child’ (PFU 138); any sexual activity in a child is merely a rudimentary foreshadowing of a bodily life as yet unawakened. What is original in Lawrence’s Freudian critique stems from his dualistic conception of sex and creativity, and his ongoing inner debate with the libertarian ideas of Otto Gross. ‘Sex’, he says, ‘is always individual. A man has his own sex: nobody else’s. And sexually he goes as a single individual: he can mingle only singly’ (PFU 136). The creative impulse, on the other hand, involves the ‘meeting of many in one great passionate purpose’ (PFU 136), as in building cathedrals or the Panama Canal. It is ‘a unison in spirit’ (PFU 136), proceeding from the upper half of the body and existing in balanced opposition to the sexual motive, which belongs to the lower half. To keep the balance between what Frieda called ‘love and work’83 is critical to our integrity, and ‘the psychoanalysts, driving us back to the sexual consummation always, do us infinite damage’ (PFU 136). The balance, however, was not between two equal forces; the ‘religious or creative motive’ took precedence over the ‘sexual motive’ (PFU 67). Lawrence offers no biological reason for this priority, no symbolisation theory to show how, in infancy, men and women are impelled to give meaning and value to the individual worlds they make; and an important reason for this is that his masculinist views of gender led him to restrict the creative motive to men. Significantly, he makes no attempt to give an age for the unfolding of this creative impulse in men. If it is a function of masculinity, does it originate in puberty? If so, it cannot account for the playing of children, as we might infer from the rest of Fantasia. If, on the other hand, the creative impulse is biologically inscribed in the male from birth, is it then possible to distinguish between the play of boys and girls? These are questions Lawrence does not raise. It is his own creativity and manliness that concern him; the fact that he knew and respected many creative women – H.D. and Amy Lowell, to name but two – has no part in his discussion. Creativity is the expression of ‘the desire of the human male to build a world’ (PFU 67); after sexual intercourse, the man awakens refreshed, his upper body revitalised and ready ‘for new collective activity’ (PFU 135). Women have no place in this collective enterprise; the ‘religious or creative motive’ is beyond their scope. This increasing need on Lawrence’s part to reserve to himself a masculine scope of activity safe from the intrusions of women

182  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious provides the clue to the ‘great conflict’ at the heart of the dual instinct theory with which he hoped to supersede the supposed pansexualism of psychoanalysis. * Although Lawrence rejected infantile sexuality and oedipal theory, he had long known children could be perverted by premature sexualisation; and in Chapter X of Fantasia he returned to the themes of infantile sexualisation and the engendering of incestuous desire that he had first explored in Sons and Lovers. It was a chapter heavily revised at proof stage, not least by the introduction of its concluding polemic against psychoanalysis. Lawrence’s account rests on the same cultural analysis as that in ‘Education of the People’, of a spiritual love widely believed to reach its highest form in ‘the love of mother and child’ (PFU 142). Children subjected to such ‘idealism of love’, he goes on, suffer hypertrophy of the sympathetic centres and atrophy of the lower centres, leaving them prey to ‘an exaggerated sensitiveness alternating with a sort of helpless fury’. Here are echoes of the ‘ridiculous hypersensitiveness’ and furious rages of Paul Morel (SL 97). The mother who establishes ‘the bond of adult love’ with her son – or, ‘instead of mother and son, read father and daughter’ (PFU 149) – commits ‘a dynamic spiritual incest, more dangerous than sensual incest, because it is more intangible and less instinctively repugnant’ (PFU 144–5). Such spiritual love has sensuality hidden at its core, and Lawrence is grateful to psychoanalysis for showing that such spiritual love ‘inevitably involves us in a conclusion of incest’ (PFU 145). It is a gratitude that tacitly acknowledges his own debt nine years earlier when, writing Sons and Lovers, his understanding of his own mother-love was confirmed in his newly acquired knowledge of psychoanalysis; and again he invokes the name of Ruskin to clinch his point, as in his letter to Garnett on 12 November 1912. The sexualisation of spiritual love in the child is accomplished ‘inevitably’ by biological necessity, by virtue of the juxtaposition and interaction of the upper and lower centres of consciousness in the body; but, as in Jung, the mental ‘conclusion of incest’ is ordinarily drawn only in adolescence. Such a conclusion awakens an innate biological aversion to incest, and the ensuing conflict condemns incestuous desire to an unconscious life whose vicissitudes Lawrence traces with increasing depth and outspokenness through the different stages of his text. In the original typescript of Fantasia the question is not raised, as the situation is treated almost entirely from the mother’s perspective. But in the two surviving sets of revised proofs Lawrence makes increasingly detailed attempts to understand the implications for the son of his sexual arousal. In TS1 it produces ‘secret, solitary sexual excitement’ (PFU 275), and in TS2 Lawrence works out in detail the biological process that produces what he now openly calls masturbation. It is a process, he says,

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious  183 of introversion. In his Fordham lectures Jung defined introversion as a withdrawal of libido from reality into an inner world of fantasy, signalling either neurotic defeat or ‘the first beginnings of spiritualisation, the first groping attempts to find new ways of adapting’.84 Characteristically, Lawrence appropriated the term for his own use to describe a narcissistic withdrawal of sexual desire from the otherness of the object to a secret preoccupation with the self. When incestuous desire is aroused but not enacted, he says, it flows into the upper centres and arouses ‘an intense consciousness in the upper self of the lower self’ (PFU 146), which leads in turn to compulsive masturbation. This is the typical fate of the modern child, as he would dramatise it later in ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’: The upper self is rabidly engaged in exploiting the lower self. A child and its own roused, inflamed sex, its own shame and masturbation, its own cruel, secret sexual excitement and sex curiosity, this is the greatest tragedy of our day. The child does not so much want to act as to know. The thought of actual sex connection is usually repulsive. There is an aversion from the normal coition act. But the craving to feel, to see, to taste, to know, mentally in the head, this is insatiable. Anything, so that the sensation and experience shall come through the upper channels. That is the secret of our introversion and our perversion today. (PFU 146) This is the fate that Lawrence is fighting against in Fantasia. The book is what Adam Phillips calls ‘autobiography set to theory’,85 and it describes a ‘tragedy’ in which Lawrence clearly feels himself implicated. The most revealing moment comes at the start of Chapter X when he describes in detail the impact of spiritual idealism on the child: It means, for every delicately brought up child, indeed for all the children who matter, a steady and persistent pressure upon the upper sympathetic centres, and a steady and persistent starving of the lower centres, particularly the great voluntary centre of the lower body. (PFU 142) This identification of delicately brought up children with ‘all the children who matter’ recalls Gross’s high valuation of neurotics, common amongst early analysts, because they experience conflicts that may lead them to resist the ethical codes of civilised life.86 Lawrence tacitly places himself amongst such neurotics, and their common ending is one that he clearly foresaw as possible for himself. ‘No wonder they say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates’ (PFU 149). It was against the threat of such sadness that Lawrence mobilised his energies; if Fantasia presents a typically modern neurosis, it also embodies a therapy.

184  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious The ‘persistent starving’ of ‘the great voluntary centre of the lower body’ in modern children saps their independence, their wilfulness and, in the case of boys, their masculinity; the recovery of this masculinity is Lawrence’s aim in Fantasia, in an exemplary therapy on behalf of an emasculated culture. His new satirical voice and the wilfulness of his prose are efforts to develop male pride and swagger. Although his Foreword states that he is not interested in appeasing an ‘introverted man’ (PFU 54) or restoring his health (PFU 59), Fantasia represents the ongoing effort of an introverted author to reach a new mode of adaptation through reactivation of his manhood. It is part of the confessional openness of his text that we may also read the cure as a function of the illness it addresses; but that is a risk Lawrence is prepared to run, and it provides one source of the dramatic life that David Ellis misses from what he thinks an excessively didactic text.87 If the prose hectors the reader, it does so as an aspect of the author’s struggle with himself; its poses are provisional, the dramatic gestures of a man who, in talking to others, is also trying to set himself to rights. The masculinity that Lawrence seeks is explored through a man’s relationship with a woman, with other men and, for the first time in these 1917–21 philosophical texts, with his children. The terms of a man’s relationships with a woman and with other men are by now familiar. Lawrence wants a man to be independent from his woman, withdrawing ‘into his own soul’s stillness and aloneness’ (PFU 150) to fulfil his ‘living purpose, constructive or destructive’ with other men (PFU 199), according to the hierarchy between them. This is the ‘religious or creative motive’ which gives men their primary fulfilment; until they achieve it and women respect it, marriages will founder and women turn to their children for emotional satisfaction. What Lawrence has to say about aloneness is useful: Winnicott would later describe the capacity to be alone as ‘one of the most important signs of maturity in emotional development’.88 What is less useful is Lawrence’s gendering of that independence, his idealisation of the male as a ‘pioneer’ (PFU 198) heroically exploring futurity. Such idealisation is tainted by the conflict it is meant to resolve, and one of its failures is its neglect of the human realities behind contemporary theories of a ‘third sex’, or an ‘indeterminate sex’ (PFU 126). In Fantasia, as Mark Kinkead-Weekes observes, there is a ‘total repudiation, now, of the idea of bisexuality’ that had been so important in earlier writings.89 The confessional note heard at the end of the 1919 Whitman essay, for instance, has gone, as though Lawrence’s usual awareness of the lability of human sexualities has been subdued to accommodate his new idealisation of masculinity. It is an idealisation extended to man in his role as father. If Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious focussed exclusively on mother and child, Fantasia, in Judith Ruderman’s words, ‘took pains to tip the scales in the other direction, toward the father’.90 Lawrence’s hope for the ‘oedipal’ family rested on his vision of what the father might be. In writing his two books about child consciousness, Lawrence had reviewed his own childhood, pondering the effect of his parents’ failed marriage on himself, and

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious  185 reconsidering his dramatisation of that marriage in Sons and Lovers. The following spring he would tell Achsah Brewster ‘he had not done justice to his father in Sons and Lovers and felt like rewriting it’.91 The new urgency in Fantasia to define the role of the father belongs to this period of reconsideration, in which Lawrence attempted to right his own oedipal imbalance and find his manliness as he struggled ‘all my might’ to recover balance in his relationship with Frieda (3L 302). In Chapter II (whose working title had been ‘Father and Mother and Child’), although the mother has greater prominence, the father is pre-eminent. The mother-child connexion may be more obvious, says Lawrence, but that with the father is deeper and more vivid. ‘So beware how you deny the father-quick of yourself. You may be denying the most intrinsic quick of all’ (PFU 76). The father’s role in family-life is ‘to stand outside as a final authority’, giving the child balance and ‘the first impulse to the independence which later on is life itself’ (PFU 90). Even in Sons and Lovers, if imperfectly, Lawrence had shown Walter Morel perform this role for his children, not adequately perhaps but well enough to give the young Paul a role-model for later in life when loving Clara; now, in Fantasia, he was trying to recover his own father in idealised form, fully potent, with all his ‘fire and relish for living.’92 Lawrence had already declared in Twilight in Italy, discussing the death of Old Hamlet, that the father-figure had been disempowered in Europe since Renaissance times, and it was this situation that Fantasia addresses. In ‘England, My England’ too, in its December 1921 revision, he worked to re-imagine the ‘natural power’ of fatherhood, contrasting the typically effete modern young man, Egbert, with his atavistic father-in-law, Godfrey Marshall, who still retained something of ‘the old smoky torch of paternal godhead’ (EmyE 16). Let the psychoanalysts talk about father complex. It is just a word invented. Here was a man who had kept alive the old red flame of fatherhood, fatherhood that even had the right to sacrifice the child to God, like Isaac. Fatherhood that had life-and-death authority over the children: a great natural power. (EmyE 16) The creative-destructive power of fatherhood that Lawrence celebrates here is, of course, the power of men over women and children. It is, he goes on, the life-task of daughters to become women under the authority of such a man as their father, and of sons to ‘become themselves centres of the same power, continuing the same male mystery as men’. The etiolated rationalism and colourless discourse of psychoanalysis cannot possibly restore such a power, says Fantasia; it provides only mental titillation: I ask you, what good will psychoanalysis do you in this state of affairs? Introduce an extra sex-motive to excite you for a bit and make

186  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious you feel how thrillingly immoral things really are. And then – it all goes flat again. Father complex, mother complex, incest dreams: pah, when we’ve had the little excitement out of them we shall forget them as we have forgotten so many other catch-words. And we shall be just where we were before: unless we are worse, with more sex in the head, and more introversion, only more brazen. (PFU 151) The American Foreword is even more forceful. Psychoanalysis epitomises a culture suffering from ‘mental indecency and dynamic impotency’ (PFU 55), and its therapeutic method makes things worse: ‘the more Freud you have, the more your head whirls with sex, and your effective centres atrophy’ (PFU 55). This is a criticism that strikes at the heart of the psychoanalytic endeavour to raise the unconscious into consciousness: ‘I have known a few analysts, and a few of the analysed, and I should say the morbidity was increased rather than decreased by the honest daylight’ (PFU 53–4). Such a remark would have wounded English friends like the Eders and Barbara Low. Lawrence was burning his bridges behind him: Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia were farewells, etched in malice, to an intellectual world he felt he had left behind. His remedy for the ills of his civilisation was to banish that which was dead within the self by tapping the creative powers of hatred and desire. It is a view held by many thinkers, including the Spinoza whom Antonio Damasio has recently championed: ‘An affect cannot be restrained or neutralised except by a contrary affect that is stronger than the affect to be restrained’.93 Lawrence’s appeal to the ‘father-quick’ was not to an introjected idealised father-imago but to the passional life of the male biological psyche, a ‘great natural power’ that still enjoyed a residual life in his own culture, as he had seen at times in his own father. His therapeutic model, unlike Freud’s, is not based on the integration of the self but on an endless struggle for self-overcoming, and nowhere is this seen more clearly than in his theory of dreams. * Lawrence’s discussion of dreams completes his case against Freud in Fantasia. At first Freud had seen dreams as disguised acts of sexual wishfulfilment, and nightmares as expressions of anxiety at those wishes; but in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he went on to adduce repeated anxiety dreams as evidence of the existence of a death-instinct, thereby enlisting our dream-life in an agon between life and death. It seems unlikely that Lawrence knew of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but in Fantasia nevertheless he produced his own idiosyncratic version of dreaming as a somatic agon between life and death. It is a theory that

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious  187 comes close to that of Wilhelm Robert who saw dreams, in Freud’s account, as ‘a somatic process of excretion of which we become aware in our mental reaction to it’.94 Lawrence had always been interested in his dreams; ‘I am a great dreamer’, he told Cynthia Asquith (3L 207), and he liked to recount them in letters to friends. His meeting with Eder in July 1914 had introduced him to psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams and, by the end of that month, as we have seen, he was describing the ‘true instinctive or dream symbolism’ in which the heroine of his poem ‘Ballad of Another Ophelia’ found her expression (2L 203). From that time on his letters are littered with allusions to dreams and playful references to their interpretation. In particular he liked the popular idea, elevated by Freud into a principle of dream-interpretation, that dreams were free to ‘represent any element by its wishful contrary’.95 It became a teasing game between him and his friends to interpret their dreams contrariwise. But gradually his references lost their playfulness and in March 1919, when writing a consolatory letter to the sick Katherine Mansfield, relating a dream about a bright planet shining over them both, he stood defiantly by his dream in the face of any interpretation: ‘Ask Jung or Freud about it? – Never! – It was a star that blazed for a second on one’s soul’ (3L 343). It was the vivid wonder and creative energy of the dream that mattered most, its power as an expression of the creative unconscious. We have seen how the early essays of Studies in Classic American Literature took this approach: art is produced in ‘a state of creation which is something like somnambulism or dreaming’ (SCAL 170), whilst criticism is practised by a method resembling psychoanalytic dreaminterpretation. Dreaming, Lawrence suggests, is a form of creativity or, in Charles Rycroft’s deliberately plain description, ‘imaginative activity occurring during sleep’96; it is one of the ways in which ‘the processes of the primary mind go on all the time’, making ‘momentous conclusions’ during our sleep that are ‘the real bases of all our actions, no matter what our mental ideas and opinions and decisions may be’ (SCAL 242). As in ‘The Fox’, dreams may point the way creatively forward in life, symbolically articulating desires of the unconscious mind otherwise inaccessible to consciousness. But what seems from one viewpoint to be creative may from another seem to be involuntary; as early as 1912 Lawrence told Garnett that he hated ‘to have my own judgments clinched inside me involuntarily’ (1L 359). Increasingly as the Studies progress, they abandon a creative theory of dreaming in favour of one that sees it as hatefully automatic. Of Dana, Lawrence says: ‘He writes of the great mechanical motions as they pass through the body and the soul in sleep, the movement of substance itself, which is the influence that makes our dreams’ (SCAL 275). In revising the second part of his Hawthorne essay in the autumn of 1919, Lawrence is clearer still. ‘Dreams are expressions of the

188  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious materio-dynamic world, never of the creative world, over which they have no power’ (SCAL 317). The dream-process, he says, is ‘a process of continuing almost mechanically in life long after creative living has ceased’ (SCAL 338). It is this opposition of dreaming to creativity that prevails in the somatic theory of dreams developed in Fantasia of the Unconscious. Most dreams, Lawrence says, are accidental by-products of the refreshment of the night, enabling us even in sleep to partake in the great struggle for self-surpassing, to participate in the battle between life and death. Sleep enables the resurrection of the creative spirit out of all that is automatic and dead within itself, and dreaming is the process that rids us of that dead material. It is itself an automatic activity, ‘the death-activity busy in the service of life’; its function, by projecting waste material into the outer world, is to make that world more real to us (PFU 177). ‘Each time we lie down to sleep we have within us a body of death which dies with each day that is spent’ (PFU 177), says Lawrence, and this ‘body of death’, removed by the magnetism of the earth, makes the ground more solid beneath our feet. The magnetic current cleanses us ‘as the streets of a city are swept and flushed at night’, and dreams are the fortuitous by-product of this cleansing current. ‘They are the heterogeneous odds and ends of images swept together accidentally by the besom of the night-current, and it is beneath our dignity to attach any real importance to them’ (PFU 178). Sometimes, however, there are hindrances to this cleansing activity, threats to the life-process from the death-process, causing dreams of particular vividness and import, and then we must sit up and attend. In a paper of 1911 on ‘The Pathology of Morbid Anxiety’, Ernest Jones quoted from Bacon: ‘We know diseases of stoppings and suffocations are the most dangerous in the body; and it is not much otherwise in the minde’.97 Lawrence too believed such stoppings of the night-current to be primarily physical, but he also knew they might be caused by emotional traumas intruding into the physical body, and that in such cases they produce what he called ‘true soul-dreams’ (PFU 180). Lawrence’s first example of a ‘true soul-dream’ has an autobiographical ring as he describes a man’s ‘passionate, disturbing, soul-rending dreams’ about a mother for whom he developed ‘a profound and passionate love’ during adolescence (PFU 180). He repeats what he has already said about the origins of such mother-love in a spiritual affection that automatically awakens the lower sensual centres of the body. The biological barrier of incest-horror, however, inhibits desire and produces a blockage in the life-flow which builds up during the day until finally released by the nocturnal death-flow in the form of passionate motherdreams. This is Lawrence’s view of the physical basis of ‘repression’ and the return of the repressed, as a mechanical process destroying the integrity, balance and spontaneity of the rhythms of organic life. The Freudians interpret such dreams as ‘evidence of a repressed incest desire’; but

Mapping the Bodily Unconscious  189 they are wrong. ‘The Freudians are too simple. It is always wrong to accept a dream-meaning at its face value’ (PFU 180) In fact, he argues, most strongly in TS1, that the figure of a mother or sister in a man’s dream is usually a symbolic disguise for his wife – an interpretation natural to someone who, like Jung, was more interested in present than past causes of neurosis, and thought of life as a process of self-overcoming. Such substitution is characteristic of the dream-process which, when baulked, automatically returns to its first great image of arrest, the mother. Although, aware of the Freudian challenge, he admits that this ‘may sound like casuistry’ (PFU 182), he repeats that, understood contrariwise, an incest-dream proves the opposite of an incest-desire in the living part of the soul; for the living soul recoils from the rigid automatic fixation of illness. His second example of a ‘true soul-dream’ is ‘a persistent passionate fear-dream about horses’ (PFU 182). A psychoanalyst, he says, ‘will probably tell you off-hand that this is a father-complex dream’; but again this is too simple. Like Jung in 1913, he argues that dream-symbolism depends on context. An examination of ‘the emotional reference’ of the horse-dream will show that the dream is the product of ‘some arrest in the deepest sensual activity in the male’ (PFU 182–3) because, to the dream-self in love with its own automatism, the spontaneity of male sensuality represents its greatest danger. There may be ‘an element of fathercomplex’, in that the dreamer may love and wish to incorporate ‘the powerful sensual being in the father’ (PFU 183). But such love ‘has nothing to do with incest. The love is probably a just love’. What is striking here is the asymmetry between Lawrence’s account of the two parents: if ‘dream-desire’ for the mother expresses ‘soul-repulsion’ (PFU 288), should not dream-fear of the father, contrariwise, express soul-desire, homosexual attraction? The strength of his assertion cannot disguise the asymmetry of his approach. The likeliest explanation for such special pleading is that, anxious to cultivate his own masculinity, Lawrence was trying to avoid the bisexual conclusion he had accepted earlier, notably in the 1919 Whitman essay. His earlier declaration that homosexuality does not exist at the biological level of the cell does not disprove its existence in the self. It may be that Lawrence’s interest in bisexuality had faded by 1921, and that Frieda was right when she said ‘the homosexuality in him was a short phase out of misery – I fought him and won’.98 But the asymmetry of the argument indicates Lawrence’s commitment to a new, more urgent idealisation of masculinity, and a new denial of bisexuality, that would continue to compromise his writing over the next four years. * In his last published work, Drei Aufsätze über den inneren Konflikt (1920), Otto Gross repeated the theme of his 1914 essay, ‘Über

190  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious Destruktionssymbolik’, that the critical struggle in life was between the drive to preserve one’s own individuality (‘der Trieb nach der Erhaltung der eigenen Individualität’) and the drive to establish physical and mental contact with other people (‘Trieb nach Kontakt, im physischen und psychischen Sinne’).99 To maintain balance between these two competing claims was the business of morality, and the main threat to such balance was, as we have seen, ‘the conflict of individuality with an authority that has penetrated into our own innermost self’. This is also the burden of Fantasia, where the main threat to maintaining integrity and equilibrium is ‘the automatism which proceeds from within the individual, the automatism which derives from the fixing of all impulse according to certain set principles or motives or aspirations’ (PFU 60). All such internalised authority, all such automatism, constitutes a trauma that interrupts the natural rhythms of the psyche-soma and inhibits the process of self-surpassing. It is a Jungian, not an integrative Freudian model. But where Gross’s vision is psychological and political, Lawrence’s is religious, esoteric. Fantasia is one of his great attempts to celebrate the ‘physical soul’ of the body in all its sensitive shifting relationships with other people and the universe, finding in his rejection of all that is dead the confirmation of his own liveliness; psychoanalysis, however, with its automatic theorisations and its promotion of the mental life, belonged to the world of death. All Lawrence’s ‘philosophical’ writings of 1917–21 set out in this way to recover the biological life of the body within a world grown unreal through mental idealisation or, in Winnicott’s language, ‘split-off intellectual functioning’; they struggle, as Daniel Dervin says, ‘to keep Eros on earth and embedded in life’.100 It was, as Lawrence’s language shows, a question of life and death; and yet his attempt to recover the life of the body is itself idealised. His playful mythopoeia emerges from an idealisation of prehistoric religious culture: his esoteric biology idealises body at the expense of mind, and abstracts them both out of the culture that gives them meaning; he grounds morality in hygiene rather than in the complexities of social interaction; and he isolates creativity as an exclusively male gift. Biology is enlisted on behalf of a chauvinist agenda that idealises men, disempowers women and denies bisexuality. Such masculinism had always been an aspect of Lawrence’s thinking; but after 1918 it became increasingly dominant, as he set out to correct the imbalance he found in himself, his marriage and his culture. It was an ideological adventure that he pursued until, falling ill after completing The Plumed Serpent, he suddenly lost interest in it altogether; but it was an adventure that in the meantime damaged his fiction. ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale’. Mr Noon and Aaron’s Rod, like the two psychology books, satirise psychoanalysis; but as we shall see, the idealisation that sustains their satire creates an imbalance which is revealed in the difficulty that Lawrence found in bringing either book to a satisfactory conclusion.

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Notes

192  Mapping the Bodily Unconscious

24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Winnicott, ed. by Lesley Caldwell and Helen Taylor Robinson, 12 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017),VI, pp. 167, 392. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 4, ‘The Voice of the Devil’. Kinkead-Weekes, p. 440. Anne Fernihough, D.H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 62. John Turner, with Cornelia Rumpf-Worthen and Ruth Jenkins, ‘The Otto Gross – Frieda Weekley Correspondence: Transcribed, Translated and Annotated’, in The D.H. Lawrence Review, vol. 22 no. 2 (Summer, 1990), p. 211. Kinkead-Weekes, p. 445. For the essential continuity between the two works, see SCAL xl. See Kinkead-Weekes, pp. 376–81 for a nuanced discussion of the evidence. H.D., Tribute to Freud, p. xii. See Kinkead-Weekes, p. 831 n. 75, however, for the suggestion that Frieda’s words concealed an ulterior motive. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), Pt. II. iv. 7, p. 178a. See George W. Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888–1951 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pp. 11, 211–20. See, for instance, Barbara Ann Schapiro, D.H. Lawrence and the Paradoxes of Psychic Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 21–36. Winnicott, ‘Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites’, in Collected Works, VI, p. 444. Jones to Freud, 3 June 1919, in The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones 1908–1939, ed. by R. Andrew Paskauskas (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 347. Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 2004), p. 304. Trigant Burrow, A Search for Man’s Sanity: The Selected Letters of Trigant Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 442–3. Gottfried Heuer, Freud’s ‘Outstanding’ Colleague / Jung’s ‘Twin Brother: The Suppressed Psychoanalytic and Political Significance of Otto Gross (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 107–12. Burrow, ‘Notes with Reference to Freud, Jung and Adler’, in From Psychoanalysis to Group Analysis: The Pioneering Work of Trigant Burrow, ed. by Edi Gatti Pertegato and Giorgio Orghe Pertegato (London: Karnac, 2013), p. 40. Burrow, ‘The Origin of the Incest-Awe’, in ibid., p. 49. Ibid., p. 49. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 42. Winnicott, ‘Review: Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung’, in Collected Works, VII, p. 123. Burrow, ‘Incest-Awe’, p. 43. Jones to Freud, 27 May 1925, in The Complete Correspondence, p. 576. Burrow, ‘Incest-Awe’, p. 50. Dervin, A “Strange Sapience”, p. 88. Ibid., pp. 50, 48. Burrow, ‘Incest-Awe’, p. 53.

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6

Aaron’s Rod Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria

I Mr Noon: Otto Gross, the Final Reckoning Mr Noon, the unfinished comic novel that Lawrence wrote in Sicily between November 1920 and February 1921, is a mature revaluation of the contrast that had shaped ‘The Married Man’ eight years earlier – the contrast between the flirtatious sexual codes of the pre-war English Midlands and the ‘new ethic’ of Otto Gross as relayed by Frieda Weekley. The book was originally planned in three parts, of which only the first and most of the second were written. Part I makes rich comic fun out of its hero’s immature sexual exploits in a fictionalised Midlands, drawing again on the experiences of George Neville, whilst Part II follows him to Germany, where the comedy of his love-affair with Johanna draws on Lawrence’s own experiences with Frieda Weekley in the spring and summer of 1912. We are introduced to a circle of characters based on Edgar Jaffe, Alfred Weber, Else Jaffe and other members of Frieda’s family; and although he does not actually appear in the text, Johanna twice describes the ideas and character of her former lover Eberhard, ‘a doctor and a philosopher’ clearly based on Otto Gross (MN 126). The quest for both Gilbert and Johanna, singly and together, is to find a true basis on which they can build their lives and, in the best traditions of comedy, their illusions crumble and scatter about them as they go. The third part, if Lawrence had been able to imagine it, would have brought the story down to 1919, incorporating the war and presumably completing Gilbert’s education in the requirements for a satisfactory sexual relationship with a woman and, beyond that perhaps, for a satisfactory creative relationship with men. In its revaluation of the past in the light of the new philosophy developed in Studies in Classic American Literature and Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious, Mr Noon belongs to Lawrence’s restless attempt at self-transformation. It is part of the struggle it describes, a piece of autobiographical revisionism that creates a new self for the present by rewriting the past, and in so doing it gives us Lawrence’s final judgement on Otto Gross. But its interest extends more widely than that; in its recapitulation of the years since 1912, its scope coincides exactly with the

196  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria period of Lawrence’s knowledge of – and interest in – psychoanalysis as a whole. Like Aaron’s Rod, it belongs to the period when he was writing out his quarrel with psychoanalysis of all schools, and both novels in their different ways belong to this process. Together with Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, Mr Noon and Aaron’s Rod make up Lawrence’s final reckoning with psychoanalysis. After 1921, as he travelled around the world, separated from the English friends who had kept the topic alive in his mind, Lawrence’s interest in psychoanalysis lost its intensity and ceased to be a vital part of his writing and thinking. Only in his review of Trigant Burrow’s The Social Basis of Consciousness in 1927 did he momentarily recapture an interest that belonged by then to a distant phase of his life. * The moral framework that sustains Lawrence’s criticism of Gross and psychoanalysis is established on the first page of the novel, in its account of the marriage of Lewie and Patty Goddard, a Fabian couple whose hearth and home are dominated by the devils on their mantelpiece. These small ornaments are consciously used by Lewie to mock orthodox pieties, and they situate the novel immediately in the transgressive countercultural terrain which is its home. The devils, however, have a further meaning of which Lewie is unconscious. They represent the repressed life of desires and hatreds that dare not show their face, even in people who pride themselves on their transgressiveness. Lewie and Patty act as if they were ‘an ideal married couple’ (MN 5), socialists and vegetarians who are happy in the best modern way; but their act is a cover for deep boredom. They repress the peremptoriness of their own bodily life; there is a satyr inside him, and an Aphrodite inside her, that cannot find expression in the egalitarian comradeship of their marriage and are denied expression elsewhere. It is the repressed life of these bodily energies that Lawrence sets out to release in Mr Noon. He adapts eighteenth-century traditions of comic satire, including that of learned wit, to celebrate the incalculableness of the spontaneous gesture and the unpredictability of the real world, and to ridicule the absurd presumptions of all those idealists, scholars, professors and theoreticians who lay down the law about the nature of the self and the world it inhabits. It was a quest involving idealisations of his own but, as he declared in Fantasia, ‘we’ve got to make a start somehow’ (PFU 69). The German-speaking world had always provided the stereotypical home for idealists, scholars, professors and theorists of all kinds, including psychoanalysts.1 Germans, according to Sea and Sardinia (1921), were ‘devils for inhuman theoretic abstracting of living beings’ (SS 51), and Mr Noon too attacks ‘the inhuman cold-blooded theorising and mechanising’ of modern pre-war Germany by contrasting it with the

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  197 ‘glamorous’ and ‘blood-rich’ Germany of the Middle Ages (MN 272). The military pride of modern Germans, the ‘horrible scientific rectitude’ of its officialdom and ‘the horrible German theorising’ of its scholarship (MN 272) are condemned as common expressions of that same ‘abstracting’ culture that had led the country into war. In the tradition of learned wit Lawrence satirises the nation by mocking its intellectual life, centring his attack on the intellectual community surrounding Max Weber. Professor Alfred Kramer is modelled on Edgar Jaffe, Professor Sartorius on Alfred Weber and Louise on Else Jaffe, and Lawrence exposes their inadequacies by focussing on the symbolic figurehead of their liberal culture, ‘the godlike Goethe’ (MN 117). In order to understand Lawrence’s reckoning with Otto Gross in Mr Noon, we must first grasp his critique of Goethe – a critique that, whilst most obvious in Gilbert’s encounters with German academics in Part II, is equally important to his erotic encounters in Part I, in the humbler setting of the English Midlands. In October 1919, shortly before leaving for Italy, whilst Frieda was in Germany, Lawrence had read De Quincey’s essay on Goethe and found his own antipathy corroborated: ‘I laughed over “Goethe” yesterday’, he told Catherine Carswell. ‘I like him De Quincey because he also dislikes such people as Plato and Goethe, whom I dislike’ (3L 407). De Quincey too had satirised the Germans for their ‘extravagant partisanship’ of Goethe, 2 seeing it as a reaction to the ‘total anarchy’ of a country rife with ‘mere speculation’ where cultural authority was dispersed amongst a variety of cities, courts and universities: ‘there it was’, de Quincey says, ‘in that very realm of chaos, that Goethe built his throne’. In Paradise Lost it was Satan, of course, who built his throne in the realm of chaos. De Quincey satirises Goethe by satanising him; and this inversion of the moral scheme of Faust must have amused Lawrence, who likewise satirised Goethe in Mr Noon by turning his moral scheme upside down. ‘Oh Goethe, what a fool you were. If only someone had given you a good kick in your toga-seat, when you were godlifying yourself and olympising yourself’ (MN 184). The comedy returns the culture in which Goethe had delighted to the disorderliness and incalculability of the life which it sought to discipline. From the ‘vast patchwork’ of European cultures (MN 107) to the ‘the various new little breads’ of Germany (MN 199) and ‘the profusion of fruit’ in Italy (MN 289), it is the variety, multiplicity and ‘manyness’ of life that Lawrence celebrates (MN 108); his attack on Goethe expresses his hostility towards any effort to unify the nation-states of Europe and homogenise their culture. The satire on Goethe takes the form of a parody of Faust. Gilbert Noon, like Faust, is a scholar who, disillusioned with scholarship, dissipates his talents in sensuality; with ‘lifted, Mephistophelian brows’ (MN 24), he is driven by an irritable sexual desire which is partly a guilty displacement of his unfulfilled creative potential as a musician. Deploying

198  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria the even-handedness of eighteenth-century mock-heroic, Lawrence satirises both the idealism of the past and the pettiness of the present: Goethe’s idealism is mocked by translating it into the material practice of the early twentieth-century Midlands, and early twentieth-century provinciality is mocked by placing its frivolous sexuality alongside the moral seriousness of Faust. It is part of the fun that Gilbert is far from being a tragic hero, and that his chosen woman, Emmie Bostock, is no Gretchen. ‘The seducer and the innocent maid are no more. We live in better days’ (MN 20), Lawrence comments ironically. Emmie’s aim in life is to circumvent her father’s control and have fun before settling down into respectability. When caught out by her father, she takes ‘bad’ (MN 45) and falls into ‘a state of subdued hysteria’ that produces ‘neuralgia of the stomach’ (MN 69). This is a far cry from Gretchen’s madness; Emmie is merely discomfited, and by the start of Part II she has happily settled down to the business of marriage on her own terms. The way Lawrence takes the fight to Goethe in sporadic parody is one of the joys of the book. The raciness of the writing, the montage of the plot and its episodic staginess all suggest Faust, and the parallels are more specific still. Faust first sees Gretchen on her way home from church, Gilbert spoons with Emmie after church; Faust seduces Gretchen in a garden-house, Emmie invites Gilbert into her father’s greenhouse; Gretchen’s brother Valentin calls her a whore, Emmie’s father thinks her a ‘strumpet’ (MN 32); Faust murders Valentin, Emmie’s father attacks Gilbert and together they fall into a gooseberry bush. If there is affection in Lawrence’s portrayal of Gilbert and Emmie, his satire nevertheless strikes equally at the highfalutin idealism of Faust and the humbug of Midlands morality for their repression of the passionate life of the body. Part II begins, like Faust I, with a tableau of German academic life. Gilbert is assistant to Professor Alfred Kramer who, like Faust in the second scene in his study, is musing on the opening of St John’s Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word’. Faust rewrote these words to read ‘In the beginning was the Deed’3 but, according to Lawrence, modern German academics have returned to the Word, a Word which ‘is not with God, but with them, the professors thereof’ (MN 102). The Professor’s Lebensphilosophie may celebrate ‘Life’ (MN 103), but his imagination is confined by the trappings of his wealth: his little country house, his honey dish, his Biedermeier furniture, tokens all of his fundamental accommodationism with bourgeois culture. Like Emmie, he turns to the world to save his soul. With his wife Louise, modelled on Else Jaffe, and her lover Professor Sartorius, modelled on Else’s lover Alfred Weber and named after Sartor Resartus, Carlyle’s homage to Goethe, the ‘obtuseangled triangle’ of his life (MN 92) offers no more than a mirror image of the tableau of man, fiancée and lover that ended Part I, and is equally disintegrative. Louise’s limitations become clear when she advises her sister Johanna not to leave her husband but to take Gilbert as a lover,

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  199 so that she might not lose her husband, children and income. For all her sophistication, she is essentially no different from Emmie. ‘She laughed hollowly’, Lawrence writes. ‘It is a stagey thing to say. But then Louise had a queer, tired, devilish hollow little laugh of her own’ (MN 149). Her Mephistophelean cynicism merely confirms the status quo: her balancing of the theoretical claims of Aphrodite and Athene, of love and the moral law, is no more than an intellectual game that disguises her imperviousness to the real bodily life of desire and aversion. All three lack connexion with what Lawrence elsewhere calls the ‘naïve or innocent core’ from which spontaneous living proceeds (IR 168); and they leave Johanna, like some latter-day female Faust, torn between her good angel, Gilbert, and her bad angel, Louise. The first chapter ends in a quarrel between Alfred and Professor Sartorius about the ethics of publishing the Urfaust when Goethe had asked for it to be burnt, and their theorising is absurd. The comedy lies in the disparity between the Olympian status of ‘the godlike Goethe’ and the all-too-human passions of the squabbling professors (MN 117). It reminds us, with the insistence of good comedy, of the gap between ideas about life and life itself. In carnivalesque Shandean spirit Mr Noon celebrates what David Lodge calls the ‘Rabelaisian’ realities of the body, the often undignified variety of its emotions and the unpredictability of its experience.4 ‘Gentle reader, it was not the silent bliss of two elective affinities who were about to fuse and make a holy and eternal oneness’, Lawrence writes of Gilbert and Johanna, in allusion to Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften; it was the congress of ‘two whirling, fur-flying cats, all claws and sparks’ (MN 185). This is living dangerously transposed into the key of comedy. Idealisation and uplift (Aufhebung) are Lawrence’s main targets (MN 156–7), and all the ‘Gethsemanes and Whitsuntides of renunciation’ (Entsagung) that, in the running battle between eroticism and civilised sexual morality, had been the message of German thinkers from Goethe to Max Weber, including Freud (MN 227); life and love are richer than our theories about them. * Otto Gross too was in rebellion against the Neinsagen of Wilhelmine German liberalism, against its celebration of Entsagung and Aufhebung. His attack on Socialaskese in 1907 targeted through Else Jaffe the renunciatory philosophy of Weber’s circle;5 his aristocratic anarchism and ‘affirmative eroticism’6 refuted their sense that the Germans were, as Weber would put it in 1918, a Disciplinvolk.7 Else herself, who had a child by Gross before becoming Alfred Weber’s lover, had vacillated between the claims of these different worlds, much as Louise vacillates between Aphrodite and Athene in Mr Noon; but finally, around the end of 1907, she had denounced Gross as a fanatic who subordinated life

200  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria to ideas, people to principles: ‘the prophet has consumed in his fire the last remnants of the human being, Otto, and has taken from him the capacity to love persons individually in their individuality and according to their essence’.8 As we have seen, Gross was hurt by her criticism, and retorted eloquently that his professional vocation as a psychoanalyst was precisely ‘to free the essential personal style of the individual from all that is alien, destructive, contradictory’, and to respect ‘the rhythm that moves in a human life, in every least movement of the body and every involuntary expression of fleeting feeling’.9 But Elsa’s charge invoked the duty that lay at the heart of the Heidelberg conception of the world: Gross’s neglect of his son and ‘inconsiderateness’ towards his wife proved that the realities and responsibilities of his life had become lost in his theories about it. Lawrence agreed with Elsa that Gross’s view of the world was theoretical; both the German intellectual tradition and its modern radical opponents, Goethe and Gross, were similarly tainted. In Birkin’s words, it was ‘“the old game – action and reaction, and nothing between”’ (WL 95). The doctrine of free love was itself a theory, a balloon in which ‘to go whooshing up in the air on the draught of sanctified Uplift’ (MN 157), and Mr Noon set out to puncture it. In so far as Frieda was still under Gross’s influence and Gross a fellow-presence in their bed, Lawrence was reliving and reconceptualising his 1912 battle for her ‘physical soul’, and perhaps through her for the soul of Germany. Johanna, the fictionalised portrait of Frieda, enters the novel like a ‘Wagner Goddess’ through the floor in a lift (MN 120) announcing: ‘“I’m German, and I love Germany”’ (MN 122). Like Gretchen before her, she embodies the destiny of her nation at a critical historical moment, and, as with Sabra in The Seven Champions of Christendom, it is an English St George who must rescue her from the ‘dragon of nerves and theories and unscrupulous German theorisers just about to devour her’ (MN 161). Lawrence writes with a comedic scrupulousness that itself constitutes an attack on theory; but in a book championing the English genius for ‘the deep accustomedness of marriage’ (MN 191), his fundamental drive is serious. It is from the unscrupulous sexual theories of her former lover, Eberhard, Lawrence’s fictional portrait of Otto Gross, that Gilbert must rescue her. We do not meet Eberhard directly, however; we learn of him only from Johanna, in an excited account following her chance erotic encounter with a stranger on a train. He was ‘almost the first psychoanalyst’, ‘a doctor and a philosopher’ who was ‘far, far more brilliant than Freud’, ‘spiritual’ – or ‘demoniacal’ – in a way that Freud was not (MN 127). He could work up the animals at the local zoo just by looking at them, until ‘they nearly went mad’ – as she herself feels ‘a bit mad’ now, in the excitement of recollection (MN 126). Echoing Gross’s reference to ‘the true Dionysiac’,10 Johanna calls Eberhard a ‘white Dionysos’ (MN 127), casting him as a spiritual antagonist of the Apollonian order of Wilhelmine

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  201 Germany, including Freud. He was ‘a wonderful lover’, she tells Gilbert (MN 126), but she remains profoundly ambivalent about his power over her. In the two weeks of their acquaintance, she says, he nearly drove her mad: he lived on drugs, never slept, insisted on having affairs with two or more women at a time, and talked all the time they were making love. He had perhaps been conducting an interminable analysis of himself and his partners, and his talking penetrated the inner sanctum of sexual love and laid it waste. Yet when Gilbert asks Johanna why she found Eberhard so wonderful, she replies: ‘“Oh, he was a genius – a genius at love. He understood so much”’ (MN 127). So seductive does Johanna find the male power of understanding that she describes her own desire in similar terms: she loves men for what she understands in them and for what she cannot understand but hopes to learn. ‘One should love all men’, she concludes (MN 164); and it is the theoretical nature of this spiritual claim about erotic love that Gilbert resists. There was a battle being fought over Johanna, however, long before she met Gilbert: the battle between the competing ideological claims of her husband, Everard, and her most significant lover, Eberhard. This ‘similarity of names’ must derive, as Brenda Maddox notes, from the names of Frieda’s husband, Ernest Weekley, and her lover in 1911, the disciple of Otto Gross, Ernst Frick;11 and Lawrence uses it to contrast the controlling idealism and repressed jealous violence of English patriarchal authority with the libertarian anti-patriarchalism of modern German radicalism, and to suggest the essential identity of these two opposites, locked together in the tick-tack of action and reaction. Everard sees Johanna as a snowflower whilst, under Eberhard’s influence, she sees herself as a dandelion, spread out in the sun that had become the emblem of the new radical generation in Germany. The bourgeois and the radical each idealise her in ways that dictate how she should live her life: the snowflower celebrates chaste holiness whilst the dandelion demands erotic joy of living. Both men impose their theories of life upon her, and it is between their two extremes that Gilbert must find a way. His conversation with Johanna is a retrospective fictional rendering of the discussions that Lawrence had had with Frieda in 1912, and that had inspired ‘The Married Man’, and it belongs to his continuing attempt to nail ‘Frieda’s nose to my wagon’ (1L 430). There are three different ways in which he criticises Gross’s ideas: by his characterisation of Johanna, as she voices them; by Gilbert’s response, as he assesses them; and by his own comic treatment of them as author. Johanna declares she loved Eberhard ‘so much’; he saved her from being ‘just the conventional wife, simply getting crazy boxed up’ (MN 126), and her account of his philosophy virtually epitomises Gross’s erotic creed: He made me believe in love – in the sacredness of love. He made me see that marriage and all those things are based on fear. How can

202  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria love be wrong? It is the jealousy and grudging that is wrong. Love is so much greater than the individual. Individuals are so poor and mean. – And then there can’t be love without sex. Eberhard taught me that. And it is so true. Love is sex. But you can have your sex all in your head, like the saints did. But that I call a sort of perversion. Don’t you? Sex is sex, and ought to find its expression in the proper way – don’t you think. And there is no strong feeling aroused in anybody that doesn’t have an element of sex in it – don’t you think? (MN 127) These ideas, poured out late at night by a beautiful woman, depress Gilbert, not least because he sees they do not make her happy. ‘It was evident she was all distraught, bewildered, roused, and yet not having any direction’ (MN 128). She is expressing ideas in which she believes but which generate anxiety. She loved Eberhard, but knew she could not live with him. ‘He was wonderful, but he was awful’, she says; he was a genius at love but needed a chorus of maenads to follow him; he was spiritual but demoniacal; he was empathic but sent the animals at the zoo mad. ‘“He would have sent me mad”’, she adds (MN 126). Her contradictions express the contradictions of her life, split between a respectable bourgeois life and its Bohemian antithesis; the ideas that attract her violate her bodily self. Although she fails to see it, her distraction, like Gilbert’s depression, is a sane response to a fanatical ideology. As Frieda herself put it later, reviewing her own youthful beliefs, ‘theories applied to life aren’t any use’.12 It takes time and effort for Gilbert to reach his own assessment of Eberhard, and in a way it is redundant since he and Johanna end the evening in bed together. Yet the depth of Gilbert’s feeling demands he confront the ideology behind Johanna’s sexual invitation. His four main criticisms may be subsumed under the general heading that Eberhard’s ideas are too simple. ‘“Why is it all so complicated?”’ Johanna wails, shortly before propositioning Gilbert. ‘“Why can’t we admit love simply, and not go into paroxysms about it?”’ (MN 129). ‘“Perhaps it isn’t natural to be simple about it”’, Gilbert replies, in keeping with the eighteenth- century tradition that led Burke to ridicule Paine, and writers like Swift and Sterne to mock the presumption of the human intellect. Else Jaffe and Max Weber were similarly exasperated by what Else called the total lack of nuance in Gross’s ideas (‘der gänzliche Mangel an Nuancierung’).13 It is in the nature of the world to be complicated, and throughout Mr Noon Lawrence works hard to show the variety, depth and complexity of the experiences – painful, ridiculous, glorious, demeaning  – that go to make up a full sexual relationship. Espousal of free love, by contrast, was an idealisation unconsciously designed to disguise the failure of actual relationships; and it is to mock such idealisation, which in real life had enabled Frieda to imagine her love as the

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  203 hygienic antidote to ‘the dirt of two gloomy millennia’,14 that Gilbert suggests renaming Johanna as ‘Panacea’ (MN 165). Gilbert’s four subsidiary points belong to an ongoing quarrel between the lovers that remains unresolved when the text breaks off. First, Gilbert attacks Johanna’s notion that love can be free or ‘general’ (MN 165): even the physical act of sex, he says, like the emotional attentiveness of the soul, is characterised by ‘exclusiveness’ (MN 166) and ‘limitation’ (MN 165). Only spiritual love can be general. ‘Sex as open and as common and as simple as any other human conversation’ (MN 193) is only possible if, like an unscrupulous German theorist, we turn ‘flesh’ into ‘word’. Johanna, of course, resists Gilbert’s arguments, seeing them as a male strategy to control her sexuality, and proceeds to assert her independence by sleeping with two other men. Second, he criticises her view that jealousy is ‘mean and horrible’, not by reminding her of her own distaste for Eberhard’s multiple relationships but by claiming that ‘jealousy is as natural as love or laughter’ (MN 165) – a belief he himself will forget later when, learning that Johanna has slept with one of their friends, he denies his own jealousy and heaps ‘passionate spiritual forgiveness’ upon her (MN 277). Third, as a mathematician gradually learning that the creative unconscious is located in the mysterious motions of the body, he attacks her need to draw love into consciousness, to make it ‘understood’ (MN 164): it is Johanna and Eberhard, we might say, not the saints, who have their sex in the head. Fourth, he criticises her pansexualism. To her claim that ‘sex is always being perverted into something else’, Gilbert retorts: ‘And perhaps something else is always being perverted into sex’ (MN 128). It is the same argument Jung had used in 1913 against ‘the one-sided sexual reductions of the Viennese school’:15 if non-sexual symbols are interpreted sexually, why may not sexual symbols be interpreted non-sexually? In the words of Fantasia, ‘the psychoanalysts, driving us back to the sexual consummation always, do us infinite damage’ (PFU 136). Gilbert, as a musician, knows there is more to his creativity than sublimated sexual desire, and as a man he is learning there is more to life than sexual relationship with a woman. Later in Part II, the sight of exercising soldiers will slowly begin to waken a desire in him for ‘death-struggles and the womanless life’ beyond Johanna (MN 209) The search to satisfy this desire would probably have been the subjectmatter of Part III of the novel, completing Lawrence’s critique of the theoretical views of sexual equality and free love Frieda shared with Otto Gross. Life must be grounded in the bodily self, and that self was gendered: ‘man must remain man, and woman woman’, he wrote, in an idealism of his own which, as in Studies in Classic American Literature, he grounded in a view of the cosmos and ‘the timeless inter-related duality of fire and water’ (MN 212). As he had told Katherine Mansfield in 1918 ‘I do think a woman must yield some sort of precedence to a man,

204  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria and he must take this precedence’ (3L 302); the trespass of one sex on the domain of the other had brought the world to such madness as experienced in Mr Noon by Johanna. The book’s virtue, as in all Lawrence’s best fiction, is that its idealisation is subordinated to the characterisation so that it exists dramatically as part of a fierce struggle between people rather than as ‘some fixed ideal’ that the author imposes upon them (MN 212). If Lawrence had plotted his book to a pre-conceived ideological shape, perhaps its incompleteness testifies to the integrity of his actual dramatic method. Lawrence’s antipathy to the bullying of theory is most powerfully revealed in what Lydia Blanchard calls the ‘furious comedy’ of Mr Noon.16 As when writing The Married Man, Lawrence recognised instinctively that comedy was the best way to sabotage Gross’s erotic creed, to give him, like Goethe, ‘a good kick’ in the toga-seat. Max Weber thought it ‘very doubtful’ (sehr fraglich) that Gross had a sense of humour17; and Lawrence’s comedy subverts the psychological narcissism, ethical earnestness and ideological over-simplification that sustained the loveaffair between Gross and Frieda in 1907–08. Gross was unscrupulous, Lawrence tells us, because he overlooked the many small realities, inner and outer, that undermined his theories. ‘How with your laughter and your loving have you kept your soul free from the curse and the dirt of two gloomy millennia?’ Gross had asked Frieda18; but the laughter of Mr Noon ridicules the folly of all such Nietzschean idealism. The obduracy of the world and the unpredictability of its inhabitants combine to satirise all those who claim that laughter and loving are simple. At one point in the first part of the novel, the mat on which a man is kneeling beside his sick fiancée slips across the polished bedroom floor and pitches him face first into the blankets. At one level this debunks early twentieth- century Anglo-Saxon attitudes; but more profoundly, as the novel repeatedly pulls the carpet from under the reader’s feet, it reminds us of the general truth that the world refuses to stay still beneath us. It reminds us too in true eighteenth-century fashion that the human reason is not the measure of the universe, nor even – pace Freud and Gross – of the individuals within it. In Leavis’s phrase, Lawrence’s comedy in Mr Noon is a ‘technique for sincerity’ that reminds us of the limits of the theoretical reason19 or, in Nietzschean terms, a Jasagen that relishes the refractoriness of the world and the often unlovable inconsistencies of the people in it. The comic writer is scrupulous where the theorist is not. A scruple may be only a little thing, a tiny reservation; but the business of the comic writer is with the little things that undermine large attitudes. The moralist and scientist write their grand narratives but, like the ‘carrion-smelling psycho-analysing nose’ of Freud and Gross (MN 205), they only sniff out a world of death. As Birkin had said in Women in Love, you can only have knowledge ‘“of things concluded, in the past”’ (WL 86). If the primary business of psychoanalysis is to

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  205 unearth the past causes of mental illness, the business of art is to surpass past deaths with present liveliness. If Freud tracked down the repressions that underlie jokes, he had nothing to say before the spontaneity and creativity of the comedic impulse. ‘We have got our moral values all wrong’, Lawrence wrote in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. It is the liveliness of the body, and ‘the perfect correspondence between the self and the object’, that count (PFU 27); and in the furious comedy and serious play of Mr Noon Lawrence found a technique to satirise the theoretical enterprise of psychoanalysis, Apollonian and Dionysiac alike, whilst keeping faith with the unpredictable liveliness of the bodily self and its efforts to maintain ‘perfect correspondence’ with others.

II Trauma and War-Shock: The Contemporary Debate In Mr Noon, flouting the expectations of his ‘gentle reader’, Lawrence sets out, as Lydia Blanchard says, ‘to create the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’;20 his new ethic, promoting bodily liveliness within constantly adjusting relationships, seeks a new narrative form to subvert old ways of life. Already in Women in Love Birkin had rebelled against ‘the old effort at serious living’ (WL 302), wearily longing for a new story that would liberate his life from conventional plot-lines: Why bother! Why strive for a coherent, satisfied life? Why not drift on in a series of accidents – like a picaresque novel? Why not? Why bother about human relationships? Why take them seriously – male or female? Why form any serious connections at all? Why not be casual, drifting along, taking all for what it was worth? (WL 302) In the novels that Lawrence wrote after Women in Love – The Lost Girl, the unfinished Mr Noon, Aaron’s Rod – the eighteenth-century picaresque is reconfigured by a twentieth-century existentialism that shows the self making its own future rather than being shaped by its past. The deterministic detective pleasures of nineteenth-century narratives, including those of psychoanalytic case-histories, are superseded in a series of novels that describe their heroes’ past only sketchily at best. The new picaresque, as Lawrence explains it in the final version of his Whitman essay, embodies the ethic of the future ‘It is a new great doctrine. A doctrine of life. A new great morality’, he writes: the morality of the soul ‘living her life along the incarnate mystery of the open road’ (SCAL 157). As the health of the body depends on the digestion and elimination of food, so the health of the mind depends on the incorporation and rejection of its immediate experience according to the morality of its own particular constitution. The great moral, religious and political questions may be recorded as they arise, but they are not to be turned

206  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria into grand narratives that give shape and coherence to life. As Mr Noon insists, life must take precedence over theory. There is no certainty, however, that the ‘series of accidents’ met on the open road will be incorporated or rejected. They may stick in our gullet, become traumatic. Trauma, in the words of Ronald Granofsky, is ‘a painful experience which defies assimilation and demands accommodation’, 21 and maybe all mental illness originates in trauma. As Freud wrote in Psycho-Analysis and the War-Neuroses, ‘we have a perfect right to describe repression, which lies at the basis of every neurosis, as a reaction to a trauma – as an elementary traumatic neurosis’. 22 At one end of the scale, as Adam Phillips says, unpalatable theories forced upon us, of which we can make no present use, are ‘minor traumas’.23 Maybe Johanna suffered such trauma from Eberhard’s theories in Mr Noon. At the other end of the scale, there are the major traumas like those caused by war. The war-neuroses of World War I would provide Lawrence with fictional material for the rest of his life, up to and including Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where Clifford’s physical paralysis suggests the deeper spiritual bruising that makes it impossible for him to move on with his life. Although Lawrence never wrote Part III of Mr Noon, exploring the effects of the war, he made war-shock the central theme of Aaron’s Rod, which he called ‘the last of my serious English novels – the end of The Rainbow, Women in Love line’ (4L 92). The Rainbow dealt with the history of pre-war England, Women in Love with the culture of an England at war and Aaron’s Rod with the aftermath of the war in England and Europe; its theme is the continuing ‘violence of the nightmare’ (AR 5) or, in G.M. Hyde’s words, ‘the trauma of war and post-war political paranoia’. 24 Psychoanalysis had originated in the study of the traumatic causes of hysteria; and although in July 1913 David Eder had thought the trauma theory of the origins of hysteria was only of ‘historical interest’, 25 events were about to prove him wrong. The work done by Breuer and Freud in nineteenth-century Vienna was about to gain European fame as a result of the cases of so-called ‘shell-shock’ during World War I. Martin Stone has shown how the Great War brought about a watershed in the history of British psychiatry that involved not only patients but also doctors, military leaders and governments. 26 The sheer number of shell-shock cases altered medical paradigms for good, diagnostically and therapeutically. It was hard to think of hysteria as a woman’s complaint or a hereditary degenerative disease when the ‘best’ of the nation’s men were suffering from it, and impossible to go on treating it in traditional asylums when new psychotherapies in more open clinical surroundings were offering cheaper, more effective cures. The development of these new extramural therapies familiarised and naturalised mental illness; it ‘brought home the artificiality of the distinction between the normal mind on the one hand and its abnormal conditions on the other’.27 In a process furthered

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  207 by poets and novelists, most notably by Rebecca West in The Return of the Soldier (1918), the war brought hysteria home to the community that produced it, and increasingly the view of Freud and Breuer prevailed over traditional medical treatment and military punishments. Hysterical illness began to be traced to unconscious mental conflict resulting from the patient’s life-experiences, and to be treated by psychotherapy. One of the side-effects of the Great War was that it made psychoanalysis fashionable, and Freud a household name. The war, however, also brought a challenge to Freud himself. As Rivers noted, it might even have been designed as a proving-ground of psychoanalytic doctrine, for it offered ‘an unexampled opportunity to test the truth of Freud’s theory of the unconscious, in so far as it is concerned with the production of mental and functional nervous disorder’.28 In their ‘Preliminary Communication’ of 1893, Breuer and Freud traced the origins of hysteria to traumatic experiences of ‘fright, anxiety, shame or physical pain’ – experiences so painful they had been repressed, causing a ‘splitting of consciousness’ which could be cured only by their abreaction under hypnosis.29 In nineteenth-century Vienna many of those experiences were sexual in nature, and Freud had argued, after his break from Breuer, that they were necessarily so. Traumatic hysteria, he argued, ran into neurosis, and the origins of neurosis lay in a repressed sexual desire: the trauma was disturbing to the patient precisely because it masked a sexual desire. It was this generalisation that was tested by the war. Jung and Adler had already broken with Freud over the question of sexuality, whilst in pre-war Britain doctors like Bernard Hart had valued Freud’s conflictual theory of illness but rejected his theory of the sexual origin of neurosis. Eder too in 1913, soon after the Freud-Jung split, attempted to rescue an ‘ideal’ psychoanalysis by arguing that ‘the really basic work of Freud’ lay not in his sexual theory of the neuroses but in his discovery of ‘the dynamic functional activity of the unconscious, and the effect of the conflict between the repressed tendencies and the rational conscious self’.30 In 1917 Rivers joined the English medical consensus, arguing that Freud’s significance lay in the dynamic structure which supported his ideas of conflict, dissociation, repression and the unconscious, but that his views of sexuality were ‘an unfortunate excrescence’.31 His own case-histories focussed, in Martin Stone’s words, ‘on the emotional world of the battlefield’, 32 on the anxiety caused by conflict between social ideals of bravery and the repressed instinct to flee. Psychoanalysts responded to this bowdlerisation of their views by asking why some people rather than others were vulnerable to shellshock, and by mocking the ‘vague idea of disposition’ that underlay most rival accounts.33 The traumatic neuroses were sexual in the wide sense of the word, they argued, and beset only people with weak or damaged egos who had deployed an excess of narcissistic libido in infancy, leaving them vulnerable in later life to war-neurosis and the sexual impotence

208  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria that usually accompanied it. This was the psychoanalytic account of the ‘crisis of masculinity’ that Elaine Showalter has identified in the Great War.34 Rivers, however, was a powerful, persuasive figure and, with the seeming advantage of common sense on his side, his revisionary position won the day. The British psychiatric profession came down, as Harold Merskey puts it, ‘in favour of Freud’s theory of emotional conflict in hysteria, but against the notion of an infantile aetiology’.35 * If Rivers used the war to test Freud’s beliefs, Eder used it to testify to Jung’s. In 1915 he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and by June was in Malta, working on the general surgical and medical wards of its military hospital. When a special Psycho-Neurological Department was opened, Eder was placed in charge of it, and for almost a year he treated shell-shocked troops returning from the abortive campaigns in Gallipoli and Salonika. His Consulting Physician, impressed with his work, tried to place him in charge of a shell-shock hospital in England but, according to Edward Glover, ‘official opposition to psycho-analysis was too great’, and he was transferred instead to a Hospital Ship and then to a bombing school.36 By 1917, ‘feeling that it was useless to remain in the Army, he returned to start practice in London again and to work under Brend as physician to the Ministry of Pensions Neurological Clinic’. It was during this period of summer and autumn 1917, when Eder’s life was ‘at a crisis’ (3L 150), that he and Lawrence were particularly close. He was certainly busy for, according to David Forsyth, when the clinic opened, he and Eder were the sole members of the therapeutic staff; ‘they were soon up to the eyes in work and laid the foundations of an organisation that ultimately comprised sixty or seventy medical officers’. This appointment was the last in Eder’s war-time career before, on 8 March 1918, he left with the Zionist Commission for Palestine. In Malta, Eder treated 110 victims of what he called war-shock, and he gave two accounts of his work: first, in his ‘Address on the PsychoPathology of the War Neuroses’, delivered on 9 April 1916 at the Malta Medical Conference, and second, more fully, in War-Shock, the first book to be written on the subject, published in May 1917 and reprinted the following April. The ‘Address’ was shaped with the intention of celebrating Jung’s work as the culmination of the pioneering work begun by Freud. It began with examples of the traumatic hysteria that first persuaded Freud of the reality of the unconscious. One patient, for instance, anaesthetised the pain of his doctor’s pin-pricks because unconsciously he was still in the trenches, fighting for his life against enemy bayonets. Eder was clearly excited by such symbolic conversion of unconscious ideas into verbal and bodily equivalents. Another soldier developed a stiff back after treatment with a doctor who had ‘put his back up’ – proof

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  209 of the ‘archaic and crude’ nature of the unconscious where there is ‘no clear distinction between words and the objects they denote’.37 The ‘Address’ then proceeded to cases that confirmed Freud’s later theory of the conflictual origins of hysteria. According to Ben Shephard, despite his scepticism about the universality of a sexual component, Eder was ‘the first person to adapt to warfare the Freudian idea that neurosis is produced by mental conflict’.38 In Eder’s view war-shock originated in the conflict between ‘the ego instinct and the gregarious instinct’, between ‘the primary, natural instinct’ of fear and the ‘soldier’s instinct’ to be loyal and brave – an analysis that also provided him with the opportunity to honour those virtues of ‘the British working man’ that were commonly neglected when he was out of khaki.39 Eder treated most of his patients by hypnosis, making suggestions determined by a brief investigative process which he called ‘diagnostic psychanalysis’40 – an appropriate therapy, he thought, since in most cases war-shock was no more than an occasional illness, caused by an abnormal environment rather than by a vulnerable constitution. But in the second half of his paper he discusses a patient whose war-neurosis originated in a deep-seated pathological failure to achieve independence from his father, and in this case the ‘bitter self-realisation’ of a psychoanalysis was necessary.41 It was at this point that Eder invoked Jung. If Freud believed that the mind was determined by its past, Jung saw it as rich with the potential of its future; driven by the purposeful psychic energy that he called ‘horme’ to distinguish it from sexual libido, and directed by a symbolism disclosed in dreams, the mind inexorably makes us confront the existential challenges of growing up. ‘I have spoken of the unconscious as something archaic and crude’, wrote Eder, ‘but I now want to correct that by adding that the unconscious is also creative and elaborative’.42 The patient he described was an obsessional neurotic in regressive flight from unconscious aspiration; and it was the analyst’s task to make the symptoms of his illness uncover the vocation they hid, whose traces they bore, so that the patient might sacrifice infantile dependence on his father and achieve an adult compromise between the omnipotence of desire and the limitations of reality. By seeing obsessional neurosis in non-sexual terms as a maladaptive flight from the existential challenges of life, and by implicating the unconscious with the future as well as the past, Jung had conferred on the neurotic a privileged position within the historical process, and this attracted Eder. Feriuntque summos fulgura montis (lightning strikes the high places): the Horatian epigraph to War-Shock, where his commitment to Jung is even stronger than in the ‘Address’, suggests that he too saw in neurosis a future struggling to be born. ‘If with Freud we may say that the hysteric suffers from his past’, he writes, ‘the psychasthenic suffers from his future’;43 and such psychasthenia (Janet’s term for what

210  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria Freud called obsessional neurosis), if typical of those who lag behind their historical epoch, also characterises those who are ‘ethically in advance’ of it. The latter are the harbingers of a new world, of the dawning civilization which may only (or may never) materialise centuries hence. Hence their conscious and unconscious selves are in constant conflict.44 It was these latter cases that most interested Eder, and both his ‘Address’ and his book devote a disproportionate amount of space to them. He was not merely fighting to persuade the medical establishment of the value of psychotherapy, but also to persuade his analytic friends of the value of Jung. Like Otto Gross, Eder believed that past traumas may in certain privileged people be understood as the birth-pangs of the future; and this was the view that Lawrence shared when, in autumn 1917, at the time of his closest acquaintance with Eder, he began Aaron’s Rod. Lawrence had always been up-to-date with the theory of war-shock. In November 1915, when shell-shock was widely believed to be caused by the impact of exploding shells on the nervous system, he had written to Robert Nichols: ‘I am sorry you are so much bowled over. It is a case of concussion: these cases are frightfully common’ (2L 443). In 1917–18, however, writing Aaron’s Rod, his understanding had become both deeper and broader. In Movements in European History he declared that ‘each one of us had something shot out of him’ in the Great War (MEH 260) whilst, also in 1919, Lloyd George thought ‘the world is suffering from shell-shock’.45 The trauma was felt to be universal; people were unable to digest what had happened to them, and to move on with their lives. Doubtless Lawrence had heard Eder speak of his war-shock cases, with their startling evidence that ‘the symptom is a symbolic (disguised) expression of an unconscious mental process’;46 and in Aaron’s Rod, subsuming Eder’s Jungian sympathies under his own general scheme, he set out to explore his own understanding of the psychosomatic manifestations of war-shock. The book was exactly contemporary with Lawrence’s ‘philosophical’ writings of 1917–21. It was begun in the autumn of 1917 in London and completed in Germany in May 1921; Fantasia of the Unconscious was started immediately afterwards, in June, and revised in October, shortly before the final revision of Aaron’s Rod. It is no surprise that, of all Lawrence’s novels, Aaron’s Rod is the one that comes closest to offering a revisionist account of the characteristic themes of psychoanalysis.

III War-Shock in Aaron’s Rod The trauma of war-shock is central to Aaron’s Rod, as a medical condition and as a metaphor of post-war British life. Its origins were

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  211 increasingly thought to lie in the conflict between the instinctive human responses to danger (fight or flight) and the defensive immobility caused by trench-warfare. Eder’s ‘Address’ and his book both signalled the psychosomatic issues involved for a soldier whose fear could not be ‘worked off’ but had to be repressed because of enforced inactivity.47 Such a man felt powerless, stuck, paralysed as in a nightmare. Chapter I of Aaron’s Rod brings this condition home to the post-war English Midlands. The nation had gone to war in 1914 in a blaze of community feeling but, as Eric Leed says, the soldiers on their return met with a callous reception from the nation for which they had fought. They experienced a ‘fragmentation of the moral nexus between front and home’,48 and hence their homecoming was fraught with political danger; the contamination of violent feeling had spread, and revolution was in the air. It is with this recognition that Aaron’s Rod begins: ‘a man felt the violence of the nightmare released now into the general air’ (AR 5). At the start of Chapter I we sense it in the ‘wrangle’ amongst the miners (AR 5) and, at its end, in the ‘wild grumbling’ of Christmas shoppers fighting over scarce goods: ‘Souls surcharged with hostility found now some outlet for their feelings’ (AR 15). The violence, however, is spurious, producing only the ‘wild grumbling’ that is the English national disease. There is no fight, no resistance, no revolution; the nation as a whole is stuck, paralysed, hysterically uncertain where to turn. It is against this background that Aaron’s flight, his desertion of his family, occurs. There are two victims of actual war-shock in Aaron’s Rod: Captain Herbertson and Angus Guest, the former epitomising the pathogenic culture of England in the first half of the novel, and the latter the imperfect liberation of British expatriates in Italy in the second. Their roles are small, but their symbolic value is great. Captain Herbertson appears just once, in Chapter X, when he comes to Lilly’s rooms like a latter-day Ancient Mariner in the grip of a recurrent compulsion to talk about the war – ‘to come and get it off his chest’ (AR 114). The phrase is precisely chosen, and suggests Lawrence’s familiarity with ‘the mechanism of symbolic conversion’ described by Eder49; for Herbertson is suffering from the trauma of having been buried alive in ‘the very front hell of the war’ (AR 113). Like the hysteric of Breuer and Freud, he is suffering from reminiscences that block the flow of his spirit and make him talk interminably. It is a conversational disorder similar to the sexual disorders described elsewhere in the book. As a man might go ‘helplessly’ to visit a prostitute, he ‘had come, unconsciously, for this and this only: to talk war to Lilly: or at Lilly’ (AR 113). At first he ‘skirmished’, rattling away spasmodically like a machine-gun and drowning out Lilly’s replies (AR 113); but the war-talk, when it comes, is monologic, obsessive and mimetic, stamped by the mechanical horror of the war it describes. Like sex with the prostitute, there is no real exchange or satisfaction: only the ‘hot, blind, anguished voice of a man who has seen

212  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria too much, experienced too much, and doesn’t know where to turn’ (AR 114). Herbertson’s memories of the horrors at the front stand out like glittering fragments of shrapnel in the body of the text; the paragraphs of his account, fading into dashes or ellipsis dots, remain open like textual wounds that will not heal (AR 115). This is no talking cure, but a blind compulsion to repeat traumatic events that he cannot assimilate or purge. Lilly and Aaron hear Herbertson out, but after his departure Lilly who, like a baffled therapist, has been listening in silent intensity feels ‘depressed’, whilst Aaron thinks he has ‘belly-ache’ (AR 118). These depressive and digestive disorders epitomise the psychosomatic illness that is the theme of Aaron’s Rod. Lawrence’s model is the same ‘biological psyche’ described in the ‘philosophical’ texts of 1917–21, and again the best picture we have of the mind is that of the body. The accounts of breathing in Chapter VI and digestion in Chapter IX show the need for the mind too to incorporate the good in its experience and, without repression, expel the harmful. It is this process of incorporation and elimination that is impeded by trauma and psychosomatic illness. Lilly’s depression and Aaron’s belly-ache show they too, with the memory of war ricocheting round their minds, have been infected by the same contagion that troubled Herbertson. Interestingly, though, they each react differently. Aaron becomes cynical, feeling that the war expresses the truth about people, whilst Lilly repudiates it utterly, seeing it as a nightmare, something that could never have happened to people in their right wakeful minds. ‘“It never happened to me”’, he says. ‘“No more than my dreams happen. My dreams don’t happen: they only seem”’ (AR 118). If his argument is strained, it is because the nightmare and cynicism of the war threaten his vulnerable sense of being awake. People must live, he says, ‘“stand up man to man and face everything out, and break the old forms, but never let our own pride and courage of life be broken”’ (AR 120). As Ursula might have said, he will see the war through in his soul, submitting to its recurrent sufferings in the hope of rising above them; he will hear Herbertson out, then cast him out. This wholesale rejection of the war distinguished Lawrence’s response to war-shock from the responses of the doctors and psychoanalysts working on behalf of the war-effort; for even the most liberal of them, as Elaine Showalter says, worked ‘within the military machine’ with a goal ‘primarily to keep men fighting’. 50 It was a contradiction that made Rivers uneasy, and Eder too, who had echoed Napoleon’s judgement on the British as ‘a nation of lions led by asses’;51 and yet his job was to send the lions back to fight at the asses’ command. Lawrence, however, took his stand against the whole military machine. ‘“Your heroic Herbertsons lost us more than ever they won”’, Lilly snaps at Aaron. ‘“There was no life-courage: only death-courage”’ (AR 120). War, not war-shock, was the real symptom. Herbertson’s heroics, like the doctors’ devotion,

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  213 expressed a death-wish that had been the true cause of the war. Out of touch with their inner liveliness, people had fallen into the war as into a bad dream. Hence Lilly’s rage: ‘“I won’t be hypnotised. The war was a lie and is a lie and will go on being a lie till somebody busts it”’ (AR 118). Hypnosis was Eder’s preferred therapy for most war-shock cases, because they were occasional in character and because the soldier’s training made him ‘peculiarly susceptible to suggestion’,52 and it was just such suggestion that Lilly hated. His angry identification of the war as an act of mass-hypnotism implies that, like Lawrence himself, he saw the supposed cure as a symptom of the disease, and the war itself as a hysterical epidemic to which no man truly alive could ever have committed himself. What Lawrence detested in hysterical illness was its histrionic character, its factitious emotionality, dissociated from the ebb and flow of the authentic ‘physical soul’. It was a psychosomatic disorder and, in March 1924 in an essay ‘On Human Destiny’, he defined it in ways that seem unchanged since he first described Miriam’s hands as ‘hysterical’ in Sons and Lovers (SL 461). Its origins, he thought, lay in a dissociation of mind and emotions: You’ve got to marry the pair of them. Apart, they are no good. The emotions that have not the approval and inspiration of the mind are just hysterics. The mind without the approval and inspiration of the emotions is just a dry stick, a dead tree, no good for anything unless to make a rod to beat and bully somebody with. (RDP 205) In writing of hysterics rather than hysteria, Lawrence was rescuing a dissociative condition from the further dissociation of a specialist medical jargon, bringing it home to the shared experience of the community responsible for it. He was not writing psychological theory but cultural analysis, and he drew a deliberately broad picture of hysteria in order to highlight its prevalence in the modern world. The difference between hysterics and hysteria was only one of degree. If hysterics are inauthentic, histrionic emotions that do not command the mind’s approval, hysteria is the mental disorder that belongs to the later stages of that same dissociation. These are disorders that disrupt the psychosomatic integrity he had imagined in his philosophical writings, and because the feelings that accompany them are disapproved by the mind, they are experienced with shame. Breuer and Freud had written of the traumatic dissociation caused by ‘fright, anxiety, shame or physical pain’;53 but Lawrence was interested in shame not as the cause of trauma but as its most characteristic symptom. In discussing Flaubert’s presentation of hysteria in Madame Bovary in 1856, Baudelaire had asked: ‘Pourquoi ce mystère physiologique ne

214  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria ferait-il pas le fond et le tuf d’une oeuvre littéraire?’54 Subsequently, innumerable writers in Northern Europe, especially in the 1890s, had followed Flaubert’s example and found in hysteria a topic to sustain their criticism of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. Lawrence mentions one such work in Aaron’s Rod in George du Maurier’s Trilby (AR 255), and his allusion points us to what is new in his own account. ‘Hysteria isn’t nerves’, Lawrence had told Barbara Low, ‘a complex is not simply a sex relation: far from it’ (2L 655). The reason that post-war Britain suffers from hysterical illness is because it has lost faith in the passionate life of the body, and psychoanalysis is a symptom of that illness. It is powerless before the psychosomatics of hysteria because, despite its awareness of the damage caused by instinctual repression, it rejects an ethic grounded in bodily life; its talking cure privileges the mind. The chapter-headings ‘Talk’ and ‘Words’ signal the importance of language and conversation to Aaron’s Rod, and it is no accident that Lawrence has chosen a musician and a writer as his heroes. If music embodies and symbolizes the spontaneous process whereby the will to live becomes involved in phenomenal life, as Schopenhauer had argued, language must evaluate that process as it occurs. Music and language exist fraternally in Lawrence’s text, mirroring Aaron and Lilly’s friendship; but music, expressing the spontaneous life of the body, is primary. Herbertson’s shame is that he cannot lay hold of his bodily life; his passions neither inspire nor repudiate his ‘ideal’ commitment to the war, and this is the true cause of his hysteria. Talking incontinently in his ‘blind, mesmerised voice’, split between the ‘bright diffidence and humour’ of his class and the ‘tension like madness’ of his emotional life (AR 114–15), he is a true representative of contemporary British culture.

IV The Home Front: The Battle of the Sexes There is another war in Aaron’s Rod, still unfinished, equally hysterogenic, originating in the same split between mind and emotions as the Great War, and that is the war between the sexes, epitomised in Chapter VII as Aaron Sisson and Josephine Ford huddle together for shelter beneath a big bare tree in Bloomsbury Square. She weeps quietly, a hysterical, destructive woman in tune with the storm raging about her, whilst he holds himself aloof, gripped by a ‘secret malady’ he calls his ‘black dog’ (AR 22). Lawrence’s metaphor, deliberately avoiding the depersonalisation of a medical or psychoanalytic terminology, suggests a growling restless depression in Aaron, masking long-repressed anger at the love-lie told everywhere in his society, especially at ‘the very front hell of the war’ being fought out between the sexes. ‘To hell with good-will!’ thinks Aaron. ‘It was more hateful than ill-will. Self-righteous bullying, like poison gas!’ (AR 25). Josephine thinks she is looking for love to find herself as a woman, whilst Aaron resists it to find himself as a man; yet

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  215 each of them is split, immobilised between conflicting impulses. Josephine is the more desperate, wanting love whilst at the same time excited by images of universal destruction. Aaron is torn three ways, between duty to his wife, the desire to engage in the love-fight with Josephine and the desire that will eventually save him, the desire for flight. Like a fallen Adam and Eve beneath the Tree of Knowledge, they make up the central panel of a triptych that first shows Aaron with Lottie and finally with the Marchesa. All three relationships – marriage, an adulterous liaison and, potentially at least, a romantic grande passion like that of Antony and Cleopatra – are studies in the hysterogenic nature of modern love. Aaron’s marriage to Lottie is the most important sexual relationship in his life, and it is shaped by the lie that love is an expression of goodwill. As Chapter I shows, it is also a relationship with a fearsome power to reproduce itself. Aaron’s daughters are unwrapping their baubles to decorate the Christmas tree, and Millicent, the elder of the two, is playing up, histrionically, hysterically even. Tension between father and daughter is acute, with Millicent tantalised by Aaron because even in his presence he feels absent to her. Suddenly she comes across the blue ball, a bauble symbolising the traditional happy family Christmas, and unconsciously sensing that the fragile beauty of the ball is false to her experience of family-life, she begins to toss it increasingly wildly into the air. Tantalizing in her turn, she is testing the limits of her father’s authority, trying to make him intervene, to feel real to her. Characteristically, however, Aaron remains detached, until finally the ball falls on the hearth and smashes into pieces. ‘“She wanted to break it”’, says Aaron, sensing one half of the truth. ‘“No she didn’t!”’ replies Lottie, sensing the other (AR 11), and Millicent, reacting to the conflict between them which was already internalised within her, bursts into a flood of tears, the first tears of a tearful book. It is also the first occasion of many in which Lawrence will destroy the integrity of an art-object in his text, out of his own deep sense that such fragile beauty is false to his own post-war age. Destruction, as Millicent unconsciously knows, is the first preliminary step to new creation. Lottie wants Millicent to deny her anger, to see herself as a good girl; she cannot allow her the ambivalence which, aggravated by Aaron’s aloofness, is her best hope of rebelling against all that is dead in her parents’ world. Aaron, on the other hand, interprets his daughter’s behaviour in terms of his own desire to break out. They both see what they want to see. The old Christian culture of self-sacrificial love has become hysterogenic in the moment of its passing, leaving men and women, in their different ways, with ideas that do not embody their feelings and feelings disapproved by their minds. An old world is passing, the new world has yet to be born. Although the novel allows sympathy for Lottie’s position as a woman and mother, it criticises her for looking back to roles and traditions that have already broken down, for teaching

216  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria her daughter the same lies she tells herself; her emotional life is staged as an overacted performance on an outdated theme, a hysterical compensation for her failure to live courageously forward. ‘In Aaron’, on the other hand, ‘was planted another seed’ (AR 159). Aaron will eventually, in Lilly’s words, ‘break the old forms’; the smashed blue ball is a fin du globe beyond which a whole new world awaits creation. Yet first of all he must break the form of his marriage; he must desert, abandon the conflict that is making him ill. It is a traumatic decision to take; and although the decision is eventually an unconscious one, when he finds himself unable to go back home from the pub, he is nevertheless drawn back twice to the scene. There is more to the first visit than the wish to recover his flute, more to the second than the nostalgic lure of autumn. What Herbertson does in thought, Aaron does in deed: he revisits the past obsessively, unable at first – as Lilly puts it – to ‘“get a move on”’ (AR 102). Like a soldier assessing the strength of his own position, he remains at his observation post in the garden shed, reconnoitring and testing his readiness to advance. Lawrence has structured the emotional dynamics of their relationship around the gender stereotypes that had informed most medical diagnoses of hysteria before World War I. Women, whether because of their more emotional nature, their greater absorption in sexuality or their more restricted social role, were widely thought to be more naturally labile than men, more liable to hysterical disorders of feeling, whilst men feared such disorders because it branded them effeminate. ‘L’hystérie’, said Baudelaire, ‘se traduit chez les hommes nerveux par toutes les impuissances’. 55 Indeed, the actual diagnosis of hysteria often seems a projective pathologisation by men afraid for their manliness. Such fear lies at the heart of T.S. Eliot’s prose poem ‘Hysteria’ (1915), in which a woman’s laughter threatens to engulf the fragile identity of her male escort: ‘I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles’.56 It is the contagion of hysteria that makes it dangerous; the woman’s throat and voice, and the vagina with which they become confounded, 57 are agents of an infectious disorderliness of feeling and expression which the man can only resist by calling up all the forces of his precarious rationality. ‘I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected’. It is a scenario repeated at the end of Chapter XI of Aaron’s Rod as Aaron, drawn back again to the scene of his married life, struggles for self-possession in the face of his wife’s hysteria. When Aaron finally approaches Lottie, he does so with his emotions and his judgement at odds; part of him longs for ‘a wild and emotional reconciliation’ (AR 123), part of him is filled with revulsion. He feels ‘a violent conflict of tenderness, like a sickness’, and hence the obliquity of his approach from the garden shed. It is one of the novel’s many

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  217 experiments with perspective, beginning at the start when Aaron pauses for a moment to glance down his garden before going on into his house. Such liminal hesitations help prise the reader away from lingering attachments to hearth and home. In Chapter XI, however, Aaron is tempted by his wife: ‘her appeal seemed to him like the swaying of a serpent which mesmerises the fated, fluttering, helpless bird’ (AR 127). As Edward Shorter shows, in late nineteenth-century medical literature ‘the ability to be hypnotized was in and of itself a sign of hysteria’,58 and Aaron throughout this scene comes dangerously close to a hysterical reconciliation. What saves him is his ‘black dog’, his ‘cold revulsion’ (AR 127). Lottie, on the other hand, enjoys herself, ‘luxuriating in the violent emotions of the scene in hand’ (AR 126). Lawrence uses the word scene here, and throughout Aaron’s Rod, to explore the connexion between the hysterical and the histrionic, implicit in the everyday phrase of ‘making a scene’. Lottie plays the part of the betrayed wife with great verve and versatility, relishing all its contradictory emotions; like Herbertson in the previous chapter, her response to trauma is to relive the past. Amidst all her attitudes and platitudes she has nothing new to say, and hence the bullying melodrama of her appeal. ‘“Haven’t I loved you for twelve years, and worked and slaved for you and tried to keep you right?”’ (AR 125). This stereotypical image of herself as a loving self-sacrificial wife betrayed by an ‘unnatural’ husband enables her to duck her own responsibility in the failure of her marriage, and to take refuge in the hysterogenic lie upon which it rests. Such is marriage à la mode in Aaron’s Rod: a wilful jealous wife and a withdrawn taciturn husband, fighting in the dark over the mystifications of modern ideologies of love. Their marriage is a battle, their pain a hysterical illness resembling war-shock. Histrionically Lottie accuses Aaron of effeminacy and desertion in the line of duty: ‘“Unmanly and cowardly, he runs away”’ (AR 125), she cries to her imaginary audience. But he is impervious. The illusion of love was gone for ever. Love was a battle in which each party strove for the mastery of the other’s soul. So far, man had yielded the mastery to woman. Now he was fighting for it back again. (AR 128) It remains an open question whether this struggle for manliness is part of Aaron’s war-shock or part of his return to health. But he is as intent as Otto Gross on preserving his individuality, on avoiding the Vergewaltigung of das Fremde: he will not be mesmerised, ‘violated into something which is not oneself’ (AR 128). He will turn his back on love in order to perfect his own singleness. *

218  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria Aaron’s instinct to avoid erotic encounter is reinforced by his experiences in London Bohemian circles where, following long resistance, he was seduced into a liaison by Josephine Ford. The picaresque hero enters the fashionable life of the capital, with what William Barr calls its ‘sociocultural degradation’, 59 and succumbs briefly to its temptations. Aaron has had affairs before – with Mrs. Houseley perhaps, the landlady of the Royal Oak – but these had been compromises rather than breaks with the form of marriage: Mrs Houseley, as her name suggests,  is passionate in defence of the family-life she betrays. The Bohemians, however, have completely overthrown the taboos supporting family-life, only to find themselves face to face, more nakedly than the conventional people whom they despise, with the shameful shallowness of their own emotional lives. Darkness broods over the first seven chapters of the novel, and it centres on London. It is here, amidst a shifting hysterical phantasmagoria, that the Bohemians dance out what H.D. called later their ‘dance of death’.60 ‘C’est même la grande maladie moderne, l’hystérie!’61 In late nineteenth-century France, as Janet Beizer argues in Ventriloquized Bodies, the totemic form of the hysteric bore the burden of the age’s anxiety, and in the Bohemian world of Aaron’s Rod it is Jim Bricknell and Josephine Ford who most obviously bear that burden. All the men have ‘been through the war in some way or other’ and are now attempting with their women to ‘sink away from the world’ in the ‘expensive comfort of modern Bohemia’ (AR 57). Jim and Josephine, however, are aware of the vacuity of their lives and, in response to the restlessness of the miners, cry out for civil war. In a parodic version of Aaron’s Rod itself, they want to bring the war home; they want to pull the house down, as Lilly puts it, to visit their own nihilistic rage on the society that produced it. Male and female, and briefly affianced, they epitomise the hysterical epidemic in whose symbolic disorders a whole civilisation may see its discontents. Josephine describes Jim Bricknell as ‘“perfectly hysterical and impossible”’ (AR 64), ‘“self-conscious and selfish and hysterical”’ (AR 68). He is a philandering vaurien, ‘a red-hot revolutionary of a very ineffectual sort’ (AR 73), excited only by images of betrayal and destruction. Twice in the novel he becomes hysterical, once with laughter and once with rage. The first occasion is in Chapter III, as sardonically he observes the mixture of sentimentality and faithlessness in the desultory flirtations and vacuous Christmas rituals of his friends. ‘“Oh God’s love, aren’t we fools!”’ he cries (AR 33). When the working-class Aaron turns up and Robert Cunningham tries to lord it over him, the absurdity of the whole situation, maybe even of his own politics, overwhelms him and, ‘in a sort of hysterics’ (AR 33), he collapses on the grass, laughing uncontrollably. The second occasion is in Chapter VIII. Jim asks Lilly to ‘save’ him whilst at the same time trying to seduce his wife – a contradiction reproduced ideologically in his praise of Jesus and Judas as ‘“the finest thing

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  219 the world has produced”’ (AR 78) – and in the end Lilly loses patience: he mocks Jim’s spinelessness and his dependence on women, and Jim in return punches him in the wind. It is done, we are told, with the ‘maudlin deliberateness which goes with hysterics’ (AR 83), and it leaves Jim – the wolf who worships the Lamb – looking ‘sheepishly’ at Lilly (AR 82). Both love and anger fail him: cut off from the authentic life of the body, love collapses into the sensationalism of empty philandering and anger into the treacherous destructiveness of nihilism. Dependent on a love he cannot feel, and addicted to an anger he cannot realise, he develops the classical hysterical symptomatology of disturbances in breathing and digestion, those processes of incorporation and elimination that are the bodily equivalents of love and hate. He longs for the deep inhalation of love and its ‘inrush of energy’, and he longs to blow away the bourgeois world in the ‘bloody revolution’ he associates with breathing out (AR 62). The greed of his eating disorder springs from the same inner emptiness, whilst his inability to stand alone is expressed in the ataxia of his walking and the long disorganised sprawl of his repose. Jack White, the real-life model for Jim Bricknell,62 was a socialist who believed in the equality of men and women: ‘Ascendancy, male dominance, must disappear and with it the submissive, irresponsible, or the nagging hysterical woman’, he argued. ‘Comradeship must take the place of male dominance or female emotional hysteria’.63 Hysteria, in other words, was a function of female disempowerment. But Lawrence was more conventional; he thought female hysteria originated in sexual dissatisfaction, which he traced to men’s neglect of ‘the creative or religious motive’ and their subsequent effeminising flight into sexuality, and hence into male hysteria. In their different ways, both men and women were betraying the psychosomatic integrity of their gender. In particular, the comradeship of the shared creative motive – for men only, in Lawrence’s account – had been grotesquely betrayed in the soldiering of the Great War, leaving men like Jim derelict, excited only by external images of betrayal that re-enact the unconscious betrayal within. It is typical of him that, having asked Lilly to save him, he should then arrange to go off with a woman. Lily mocks him mercilessly: ‘“You want to be loved, you want to be loved – a man of your years. It’s disgusting – ”’ (AR 82). Jim is living proof of the argument in Fantasia that men suffer ‘infinite damage’ if they are always driven back to ‘the sexual consummation’ (PFU 136), and it comes as no surprise to find that he ‘is waiting to be psychoanalysed’ (AR 98). He has chosen a therapy in the image of his complaint, a therapy where the ‘religious’ desire of men for creative collaborative work is, in the words of Mr Noon, ‘always being perverted into sex’ (MN 128). Jim’s female counterpart in hysteria is Josephine Ford; her proneness to weep and her sexual promiscuity are typical symptoms of female hysteria. Her character is based on Dorothy Yorke whom, if H.D.’s Bid Me To

220  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria Live is accurate, Lawrence believed to be ‘suffering from suppressed hysteria’.64 Josephine wants to find a man to love because in herself she feels as ‘nothing’ (AR 68); she lacks sufficiency, backbone, the capacity to be alone. Once again, something else is being perverted into sex, and because of her own lack, she cannot find a man worth loving. She cannot find the satisfaction in her own sexuality that was, for Lawrence, the biological imperative of womanhood. The reason for her desultory pursuit of Aaron is unclear. She seems to see something of her own suffering mirrored in his face, and hence her urgency that he return to the family whose absence she feels strongly from her own life. ‘“Won’t you go home to them?” she said, hysterical’ (AR 37). But at the same time his suffering excites her erotically, making her want to seduce him. Like Jim, she is split between sentimentality and treachery, and her hysterical weeping expresses the shame and hopelessness she feels at the inauthentic, dissociated nature of her desires. The danger for Aaron is that she may implicate him in her inner chaos. Once again the unruly sexuality of a hysterical woman threatens to be contagious; and although Aaron at first resists her amidst the hysterica passio of the storm, the turbulence of her feelings eventually seduces him. This will be one of the turning points of the book. The chapter in which we learn of his affair begins with Aaron’s falling over in Covent Garden. Jim staggered as though with ataxia, Aaron collapses as though drunk; both men have lost their footing, their self-sufficiency, their capacity to stand tall. In medical language, Aaron succumbs to flu, the virus that killed so many people after the war; but Aaron understands his condition differently. Traumatised by seduction, he sees his symptoms as expressions of shame and guilt. Lilly comforts him, as Lawrence had comforted Robert Nichols in November 1915, with an organic account of his illness. Aaron’s depression, he says, is the result of his illness; but Aaron thinks his illness the result of his guilt. At first the chapter may seem poised between the languages of physical and psychological medicine, out of respect for the psychosomatic mysteries of the human body; but in context it constitutes the central variation on Lawrence’s theme of hysterical illness. Aaron says he wept after giving in to Josephine, his moral collapse broke his heart, his liver, his bile (AR 89–91); and this scattershot search for a language of internal sensation reveals a hypochondriasis that is the male equivalent of the hysteria he has caught from Josephine. Guilty, sulky, feverish and depressed, Aaron is three times said to be full of ‘self-repulsion’ (AR 93–5). He is ashamed, not ‘in proper control of himself’ (AR 91); he lies ‘in a sort of heap in the bed’ (AR 95), and his normal icy self-possession melts in an incontinent outpouring of talk that – like his tears – expresses the disturbance in the rhythms of his soul. At the other extreme, he experiences a constipation that seems like a somatisation of his guilt. He cannot ‘get a move on’ (AR 102); the motions of his body, like those of his soul, are ‘stuck’ (AR 96), traumatised, bent on death.

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  221 As the chapter-heading tells us, this is Aaron’s low-water mark in the book. At one moment he may seem ‘like a dog that is ill but which growls from a deep corner, and will bite if you put your hand in’ (AR 93), but at the next his ‘black dog’ reveals the soft underbelly of its hysterical emotions. A similar moment of weakness threatens him later when, unsettled by his affair with Josephine and his subsequent illness, he returns home to his wife and imagines a scene of ‘wild and emotional reconciliation’ (AR 123). But gradually Aaron’s black dog recovers its growl and, by the start of Chapter XII, driven by ‘the savage sarcasm that lay at the bottom of his soul’ (AR 130), he follows Lilly to Italy. It is his illness that saves him, and the way in which that illness presents itself. There is wisdom in Lawrence’s avoidance of the minor trauma of medical terminology. Aaron’s ‘black dog’ is what Murray Cox and Alice Theilgaard call a ‘mutative metaphor’, a metaphor ‘through which the body “speaks”’,65 transforming symptoms into a site for creative play. Nietzsche developed just such a metaphor in The Gay Science when, invoking the self-healing potential of his symptoms, he wrote: I have named my pain and call it “dog” – it’s just as faithful, just as obtrusive and shameless, just as entertaining, just as clever as every other dog – and I can scold it and take my bad moods out on it the way others do with their dogs, servants, and wives.66 Although Aaron is a musician and taciturn, not verbally gifted, Lawrence uses the metaphor of the ‘black dog’ to depathologise his depression, to give it teeth, to leave it ambiguously poised between sickness and health. Aaron’s ‘bile’, like Baudelaire’s spleen, retains enough playfulness to suggest the strength to achieve at least an imperfect liberation, and this will be the business of the second, Italian half of the novel.

V Italy: Images of Imperfect Liberation In a small hotel in Milan, we meet the novel’s second victim of warshock, Angus Guest. The symptoms are immediately obvious to Aaron. ‘He was surely one of the young officers shattered by the war’, he thinks (AR 186), seeing him with his friend Francis on their hotel balcony. They have been watching the protest of an unruly socialist mob violently broken up by the Italian police: clearly the violence of the nightmare has infected the air of Italy as well as Nottingham. Throughout post-war Europe men and women are restless for new ways of living; but all they find is ‘fretfulness, irritation, and nothing in life except money’ (MEH 239). The old social order has been shattered, along with the blue ball, leaving only a depersonalised hysteria. Angus describes his enlistment and subsequent hospitalisation as a pursuit by the Erinyes. He signed up under the influence of a general epidemic of enthusiasm extrinsic to his

222  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria real state of being, and in hospital too his feelings still felt extrinsic, as though they were flies, Erinyes, swarming over him as over corpses in the trenches: The feelings all came on to me from the outside: like flies settling on meat. Before I knew where I was I was eaten up with a swarm of feelings, and I found myself in the trenches. God knows what for. And ever since then I’ve been trying to get out of my swarm of feelings, which buzz in and out of me and have nothing to do with me. (AR 193) He feels the same shame and revulsion as Aaron after his seduction by Josephine; as Aaron wanted to be hospitalised as ‘a piece of carrion’ (AR 93), Angus too thinks of his body as dead meat. Both men are too traumatised to build their lives on the authenticity of bodily feeling. Angus and Francis are painters, perhaps dilettante, perhaps serious, travelling to Rome to make up for time lost in the war. Lawrence’s feelings for them are mixed in ways they were not for the Bohemian set in London; his satire is mixed with ‘admiration and sympathy for outsiders both able to cope with the world and willing to help another person’.67 Knowing that money is the only authority recognised in the post-war world, they set out like adventurers, or lovable rogues in a picaresque novel, to master the part of young English milords. Alongside Lady Artemis Hooper in London, they epitomise the spirit of ‘the modern, social freebooter’ (AR 129). Performers and spectators alike, they practise a post-Nietzschean morality of self-fashioning, transforming symptoms of incipient hysteria into theatrical skills which extend the self and exert a measure of power over the world. Unlike Herbertson, who is stuck in the past, endlessly re-enacting his trauma, Angus and Francis turn the self-healing potential of the symptom to creative ends. They show a kind of ‘life-courage’ (AR 120), like that shown by Alvina Houghton in The Lost Girl, whose performances with the Natcha-Kee-Tawara troupe transform her life from the mere ‘play-acting based on hysteria’ that it had been during her traumatic time as a midwife (LG 33). Playing the roles of a couple of upper-class swells, Angus and Francis justify life as an aesthetic phenomenon, and theatrical terms cluster around them. Paul Fussell has pointed out the habit of officers of ‘hurling themselves into theatregoing when on leave’,68 a habit continued in peace-time in the first part of the novel when the London Bohemians went to see Aida. But in this novel of defamiliarising perspectives, the box was too close to the stage, and the ‘sham’ of Egypt was revealed as a ‘shame’ (AR 46); the art-forms of nineteenth-century bourgeois society no longer bear close inspection. This earlier episode is picked up by Lawrence in the second part of the book in relation to real life. Angus announces that the ‘scene’ from the ‘balcony’ was ‘one of the funniest

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  223 things I ever did see’ (AR 187), rounded off perfectly by Aaron’s postlude of Scriabin. Later that night Francis makes such a good audience himself that Aaron, recounting his life-history, turns it into a ‘comedy’ for them (AR 194). Two days later ‘the two young heroes’ (AR 196) are at it again, staging another scene, The Tea-party in the Train. Lawrence admires the chutzpah of his young adventurers, much as in real life he admired Maurice Magnus for ‘playing his role of the gentleman’: ‘I prefer him, scamp as he is, to the ordinary respectable person’ (IR 68). Yet such roles are shameful too; Angus’s delight in the visual and aesthetic is a defence against more vital bodily communication. Behind all his performance lies his hysteria. The existential freedom enjoyed by the two friends, though liberating, is also a dissociation, a lack of passionate connexion with the world, the result of traumatic experiences of war that have left them unmanned, deracinated and adrift in time. ‘“We’re shattered old men, now, in one sense,”’ says Angus. ‘“And in another sense, we’re just pre-war babies”’ (AR 193). Their liberty is imperfect; like the comedy that Aaron fashions out of his life, it is ‘mixed, like most things in this life. Mixed’ (AR 194). Similar mixed feelings gather round the expatriate community in Florence headed by James Argyle. These people too provoke a mixture of warmth and satire, with their ‘wicked whimsicality’ (AR 218) and spiteful freedom dwarfed by the powerful Renaissance male statuary in the Piazza della Signoria. In an act of economic necessity that symbolises the inversion of his life-style, Argyle has just had his suit turned by an Italian tailor. His homosexuality, his misogyny, his improvidence, his philosophical materialism, his reactionary politics and his wit are all shaped by the energies and pleasures of blasphemy. Yet to blaspheme is to remain in the grip of the sacred. Argyle remains ‘“an obstinate love-apostle”’ (AR 240), and the gate to his happiness is strait – ‘“A damned tight squeeze,’” he says, with typical obscenity (AR 277). For all his freedom of word and deed, he is still subject to the obsessional need for a lover, and is declining into a lonely old age, with a laughter that, alongside its Bacchic exhilaration, also recalls the hysterics of Jim Bricknell’s ‘belly-ache for love’ (AR 58). His need is ‘at once real and sentimental’ (AR 239), true and false together. The Marchesa too, in the third panel of Lawrence’s triptych of modern love, inhabits the same paradoxical borderland as Argyle and the novel’s other expatriates – the borderland between hysteria and creativity where symptoms are only imperfectly transformed into the strengths necessary for renewal of life. She has a ‘peculiar heavy remote quality of pre-occupation and neurosis’ (AR 223) and suffers, like a soldier with war-shock, from a kind of mutism. She has lost the power to sing, ‘probably’ because of the war, she says (AR 221). Her husband attributes her condition to his absence during the war, but the true cause lies deeper than that, in a kind of ‘marriage-shock’ caused by their mutual

224  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria ambivalence. She feels trapped by the ‘wet walls of emotions and ponderous chains of feelings’ generated by her husband (AR 227), whilst he feels unmanned by her determination to ‘make of me that which serves her desire’ (AR 243). Deliberately Lawrence recalls the Sissons’ marriage. There are differences, of course, in aristocratic Italy: the Marchesa, with her husband’s connivance, takes a lover. But the similarities are more marked than the differences. As in Mr Noon the second part of the novel is full of echoes and re-enactments of the first; the picaresque novel has been disciplined into a pattern of repetition-compulsion that bespeaks the inescapable trauma of the war and its underlying cultural preconditions. It is difficult ‘to get a move on’. The Marchesa and her husband embody a wider malaise: gnawed by the unsatisfactoriness of their love, the man has gone to war and the woman succumbed to neurosis. When Aaron and the Marchesa fall in love, they seem at first to transgress ‘the bounds of life’ (AR 227); but it is autumn in Florence, not in a novel of spring regeneration, and the power-struggles of the old world are deeply entrenched. The Marchesa’s love for Aaron only helps her towards health by exploiting its hysterical components, as she herself implies when, preparing at last to sing, she dramatises herself as the tonedeaf Trilby, the eponymous heroine of du Maurier’s novel, transformed into an operatic star under the sinister hypnotic influence of Svengali. Standing there, like a docile female patient before an audience at the Salpêtrière, she casts Aaron as both her doctor and, despite her disavowal, her Svengali, her abuser. Such histrionic role-play, such complex deceptions and self-deceptions about power and submission characterize sexual relationships throughout the book. As the tangle of literary allusion shows, neither Aaron nor the Marchesa can find a new self through their love. Their feelings, like Argyle’s affairs, are ‘at once real and sentimental’, a focus of new life and a dissipation of selfhood in spurious self-dramatisation. As her name suggests, the Marchesa del Torre resembles some heroine of romance, Rapunzel perhaps or the Lady of Shalott, locked up in the tower of her private conceit of love, waiting to be awakened by the man of her dreams. It is a common Lawrentian theme, but treated grotesquely here as he parodies the fictional forms and erotic myths that elsewhere sustained him. There is no rebirth through love, as the references to Antony and Cleopatra show. The narcissistic grande passion the Marchesa invokes, at least with part of herself, and whose potential Aaron recognises inside himself, is the ultimate ‘belly-ache for love’ in the book, its ultimate mode, alongside war, of the ‘death-choice’. There is no ‘new heaven, new earth’ for these middle-aged lovers to redeem the shame of their disintegration. The Marchesa’s love-making reveals her as both woman and child: as both a phallic woman with occult power and the child Brunnhild sent to sleep by the father whom she still adores. She cannot act her age and meet the challenges of adulthood. Curled up ‘small, small’ on Aaron’s

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  225 breast (AR 272), she reveals the oedipal roots of her ambivalence to men, whom she must idealize and destroy. As Millicent unconsciously wanted to break her father’s blue ball which she cherished, so does the Marchesa need to destroy the fetishised ‘God-and-victim’ male (AR 273). ‘Absolutely gone in her own incantations’ (AR 273), transgressing the bounds of the present, she nevertheless has nothing creative to contribute to the future, and the novel, as once with Josephine (AR 72), closes its ‘ponderous door’ against her (AR 274). Nor can Aaron resolve the contradictions of his own grande passion. In the erlebte Rede of Lawrence’s narrative, it may be that the contradictions in the Marchesa are simply those in Aaron’s own response to her – contradictions that emerge out of his contradictory feelings about himself. He revels in ‘the magic feeling of phallic immortality’ she gives him whilst recognising ‘it simply blasted his own central life’ (AR 272). His sexuality undermines the integrity of his self. In the language of Fantasia once more, Aaron illustrates – like Jim Bricknell – the ‘infinite damage’ done to a man addicted to ‘the sexual consummation’. What saves him from surrendering finally to his own sexuality, as the Marchesa does, is that, gradually, his ‘black dog’ is crystallising out into a sense of independent self, separate from any relationship. ‘He was neither God nor victim: neither greater nor less than himself’, he reflects, as he prepares to leave her (AR 274). It is a belief for which he is indebted to Lilly, and it is to Lilly that he turns.

VI Rawdon Lilly as Psychic Physician Lawrence is drawn in Aaron’s Rod to the ‘odd or extraordinary people’ found in England (AR 26), much as Gross and Eder had been drawn to the neurotic, and Jones’s friend Trotter to the ‘mentally unstable’.69 All three berated Freudian analysis for wanting ‘to restore the abnormal mind to the “normal”’70: in a society mesmerised by what Trotter called ‘herd suggestion’,71 it was the abnormal and the dissident who mattered, whose sufferings were the labour-pains of the future. Sir William and Lady Franks, with whom Aaron stays on arrival in Italy, epitomise the bourgeois idea of normality in the novel, as they act out what G.M. Hyde calls ‘their gracious charade of being a ruling élite’.72 Sir William has devoted his life to ‘“making provision for oneself and one’s family”’ (AR 143); he has lived to work and sacrificed much for his success. But prudence has its price: for all his worthiness he is envious of Lilly, who neither toils nor spins, and he is afraid of death, because he has never lived fully. His wife too is dissatisfied, and turns to art in a typically bourgeois way to replace all that is missing from her own life. Her love of harmony reflects her need to be rooted, whilst Aaron’s love of melody, as befits a picaresque hero, reflects his wish to live spontaneously. The Franks’ marriage is happy in the worldly sense; but if this is the normal, Lawrence prefers the odd. In Aaron’s Rod he has divided his

226  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria ‘odd’ characters into those who stay at home, whose hysterical states are defences against change, and those who travel abroad, whose hysterical states are partially transformed into states of existential liberty; and most remarkable amongst this latter group is the ‘odd, quiet little individual’ Lilly (AR 88). Lilly is the one person who may have a cure for the hysteria that affects everyone in the book, including himself. Although no mere self-portrait of Lawrence, he embodies many of his creator’s own hopes and fears during the post-war years, especially those surrounding his belief that he had the answer to the spiritual ills of his time. Early in 1918, whilst writing the first draft of Aaron’s Rod, Lawrence wrote to Lady Cynthia Asquith with a kindly suggestion amidst what she called ‘the misery and hystericalness’ of his war-time letters73: the suggestion that her autistic son should spend time with Frieda and himself. ‘I think I might be, in some sort, a psychic physician – not doing anything direct, but merely as a presence – especially Frieda and me together. – Though of course it may be a conceit and a fallacy. But – I would help if I could’ (3L 201). Aaron’s Rod is similarly poised between its hope that Lilly is a psychic healer – Nietzsche’s ‘philosophical physician’, perhaps74 – and its fear that he is conceited and mistaken. It belongs to that Romantic tradition of thought where passionate commitment is embraced in the ironic knowledge that it may yet prove to be illusory. Lawrence knows that his novel may be tainted by the same hysteria it sets out to diagnose and cure, and that his own authority as author carries no more guarantee of immunity than that of Lilly. Twice Lawrence shows Lilly approaching another man intimately in the belief that he has power to save him. The first occasion ends in fiasco when Jim Bricknell punches him in the wind: ‘“You shouldn’t play at little Jesus, coming so near to people, wanting to help them”’, his wife gloats maliciously (AR 85). The second occasion, however, when he massages the constipated, fever-stricken Aaron, illustrates, in Nietzsche’s phrase, a ‘system of hygiene’75 which sets Aaron back on the road to health. Peter Buitenhuis concludes his study of the patriotic war-time propaganda undertaken by literary figures with an account of those post-war authors who rendered the war in characters ‘dominated by their blood and their nerves’.76 Aaron’s Rod is an early example of such writing. What distinguishes it from its successors is that Lawrence’s concern for blood and nerves is grounded in his own idiosyncratic version of that belief in ‘the physiological basis of mind’ that, as Carolyn Steedman shows, was widespread in late nineteenth-century psychological and educational thought.77 Like Nietzsche, Lawrence traces the hysterical illnesses of his society to ‘ignorance in physiologis – accursed “idealism”’,78 and it is his vision of the ‘biological psyche’ that substantiates Lilly’s fantasy of himself as a saviour and psychic healer. Lilly understands how, in Nietzsche’s words, ‘the tempo of the metabolism stands in an exact relationship to the mobility or lameness of the feet of the

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  227 spirit’79; his massage of Aaron in Chapter IX is a holistic recognition that the metabolism of his digestion stands ‘in an exact relationship’ to the crippling guilt of his spirit. In line with the obliteration of homosexuality from Fantasia, Lawrence presents the massage as deliberately non-sexual. It is such as mothers traditionally give to constipated babies, Lilly says; and as Judith Ruderman observes, it shows how the masculinist Lilly, by usurping the woman’s nurturing role, resists the temptation to rely ‘on the female for nourishment and support’.80 He adopts the ancient male role of medicine-man, of healer, and succeeds where the doctor’s pills fail, and where a psychoanalyst’s talking cure would also fail, because his treatment restores the body to the pre-eminence from which hysteria has displaced it. The new sparkle in Aaron’s eyes and the faint smile on his lips suggest that, as a result of the massage, his digestive processes too have begun to move; and one manifestation of this is the conversation that strikes up between the two men towards the end of the chapter. Aaron’s earlier feverish incontinence of talk and his habitual laconic reserve are beginning to find a new point of balance. The effect of the massage on Lilly himself, however, is far from therapeutic. Whilst Aaron is restored and falls into a proper sleep, Lilly is exhausted physically, mentally and spiritually. Like Jesus touched by the woman with the issue of blood, he feels a loss of ‘virtue’ and, in his weakness, indulges a long rancorous fantasy about people’s vindictiveness against their would-be saviours. Jim Bricknell’s punches epitomise what he fears not only from Aaron but from everyone; and his fantasy turns into a jeremiad against ‘the nation, Lloyd George and Northcliffe and the police and money’ (AR 96), and all those other fetish-objects that harden people’s hearts against the ‘healthy individual authority’ to which he himself would subject them (AR 97). The novel is full of such passages of grievance; some are spoken by women, but most are spoken by men, mostly directed against women. They are complaints in a double sense: grievances and sicknesses, the symptoms of male hysteria. ‘“You talk to me like a woman”’, Lilly snaps at Aaron (AR 105), angered by the hysterical, possessive note in his voice; but it is an anger that betrays its origins in the traumatic experience of his own marriage, of his own dominant wife. What Lawrence diagnoses is what Nietzsche calls ressentiment, the most dangerous temptation facing the sick soul: ‘Ressentiment is the forbidden in itself for the invalid – his evil: unfortunately also his most natural inclination’.81 To grumble, to envy, to blame, to thirst for revenge: such ressentiment clings to the traumas of the past and ducks the challenges of the future. For Lawrence as for Nietzsche, it is the histrionic projection of a cowardly nature shirking self-responsibility, and Lilly struggles against it throughout, both in himself and in others. Hence his rudeness to Aaron and Jim, and hence his sudden silence at the end of Chapter IX. He is struggling against his trauma for the remedy of self-possession, struggling (in Nietzschean

228  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria phrase) to become what he is, or what he would be – a psychic physician ministering to the physical soul. Lilly’s jeremiad reveals his implication in the hysterical illnesses of his time. The capacity to be alone, to relish masculine self-confidence, is one thing; but to reify masculinity or to valorise the power of the man over the woman is another. Lawrence knew that the search for manliness, in himself and Lilly, might be hysterical in origin and prove a dead end. In Sea and Sardinia, written in early 1921 whilst Aaron’s Rod was ‘stuck’ (3L 602, 608), he had already confessed its hopelessness. His holiday in Sardinia with Frieda had become in the writing a quest for lost masculinity, impelled by the hysterogenic images of woman that begin and end the book. Driven out of Sicily by the white witch of Etna, disturbed by the ‘terrible echo’ emanating from the Astarte of Trapani (SS 37), the narrator, bristling with irritability, seeks support in the strong gender stereotypes discovered in Sardinia. But his quest ends where it began, in Palermo, watching a marionette play depicting the attempt of a small band of Paladin knights to release one of their brethren from a white witch by burning her statue. ‘Oh it was a very psychoanalytic performance altogether, and one could give a very good Freudian analysis of it’, the narrator writes; the knights may burn the statue, but as the watching men know, they cannot destroy ‘this white, submerged idea of woman which rules from the deeps of the unconscious’ (SS 191). Sardonically Lawrence dismisses the Freudian theory of unconscious desire as primary: it is ideas that shape our desire. Like Jung and Trigant Burrow, he believed it was the idea of woman that ruled in the unconscious. The white witch of the marionette theatre embodies the ‘Mother-incest idea’ against which he had warned Katherine Mansfield in 1918 (3L 301) and, he says, it is an idea that ‘endures’. His narrator has travelled across Sardinia only to come home at last, having discovered what Lawrence himself sometimes thought, that all travelling is ‘a form of running away from oneself and the great problems’ (4L 313). Lilly too, in Aaron’s Rod, is a great traveller across boundaries and frontiers. Is he seeking? Or running away? Is his search for manliness and leadership a symptom of hysteria or its cure? Is it the recognition of a real need or the omnipotent delusion of a ‘freak and outsider’, driven by ressentiment (AR 289)? What Lilly aims at is what Weber called charismatic leadership, a word he first used to describe the appeal of Otto Gross but which, ironically, is also applicable to the masculinist politics Lawrence developed between 1918 and 1925. This was the highpoint of Lawrence’s reaction against Gross’s feminism, erotic libertarianism and revolutionary anarchism, and the climax of a critique that began with Twilight in Italy and culminated in The Plumed Serpent. As Gross became the ‘living antithesis’ of his father,82 Lawrence became, in sexual and political matters, the antithesis of Gross, celebrating an idealised patriarchy that is nevertheless a distant echo of Hans Gross’s world and an adumbration

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  229 of fascisms to come. Lilly is not interested in powers but in power, power transcending talent, expertise and entitlement and grounded in the force of a heroic personality whose authority surpasses the apparatus of the bureaucratic state. He aspires to be charismatic in Weber’s sense of the word, a personality ‘free of the ordinary worldly attachments and duties of occupational and family life’, negligent of such ‘methodical rational acquisition’ as that of Sir William Franks, and wedded to ‘the specifically creative revolutionary force of history’ – a man whose ‘divine mission must prove itself by bringing well-being to his faithful followers’.83 Such power, says Weber, is inherently unstable (labil) but may bring about change – as Lilly does with Aaron when, by laying-on of hands, he brings a sparkle to his eyes and a smile to his lips. Increasingly throughout the novel, Aaron responds to Lilly’s charisma until, in its closing pages, he is brought to the point of final commitment when he must decide whether or not to follow him as a disciple might. There are many stages on the journey that brings Aaron to this point and, in each case, his desire for rapprochment with Lilly triumphs over his obstinate resistance. Already Lilly’s massage had lifted his ‘depression’ (AR 95), his presence had prompted him to escape the Marchesa. The crucial moment comes when, with the novel drawing to an end, its preoccupation with the traumatic impact of war-shock reaches its climax. C R A S H! The terrorist bomb in Chapter XX is the culmination of the hysterical violence in post-war Europe, and briefly it opens up a breach, a textual wound, in the syntactical flow of the book. It is a shameful act, random and nocturnal, and brings ‘one awful minute of pure shock, when the soul was in darkness’ (AR 282). Out of this darkness Aaron emerges to see Lilly and, unconsciously, spontaneously, turns towards him. This is the turning point of the book, a ‘life-choice’ followed immediately by another as Aaron, discovering that his flute is irreparably smashed, takes Lilly’s advice and throws the pieces into the river. It is advice that arms the soul against histrionics, and prepares Aaron to cast himself on the mercy of Providence; the long process of denudation which has shaped the picaresque form of the novel, as it also shaped King Lear, is finally complete. Trauma, as we see it in Aaron’s Rod, is a damaging, unassimilable encounter with the world; it is dealt with, as Lilly dealt with the war, by psychic elimination, by a hatred not to be confused with denial. The war ‘“never happened to me”’, says Lilly. ‘“No more than my dreams happen”’ (AR 118). Now, with the destruction of his flute, his ‘rod’, Aaron is nearing the time when he may finally be able ‘to get a move on’, to end his old relationship with the world, where self-possession had been vitiated by sexual desire and reliance on the patronage of the wealthy. There is one last stage to Aaron’s journey in Lawrence’s book, however, which brings us back to the novel’s engagement with psychoanalysis. *

230  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria In Chapter XIV, oddly, for no apparent reason, Angus Guest suddenly seems to recall that Lilly is away ‘“in Munich, being psychoanalysed”’ (AR 194). Perhaps like Jim Bricknell, Lilly too has been ‘“waiting to be psychoanalysed”’ (AR 98), and has gone to Munich, the old haunt of Otto Gross, to undertake his therapy. It is an announcement with no obvious bearing on anything else in the book. Once again perhaps, Lawrence was privately informing Frieda that he had taken the measure of her former lover Otto Gross, and of his profession, and subsumed them both under his own vision. The effect of Angus Guest’s words on the reader, however, is to create an awareness of psychoanalysis as something pertaining to the world outside the text; they signal the spectral presence of a power that haunts the book by its absence. Freud makes his off-stage appearance as an outcast patriarchal authority whose beliefs and treatment leave no mark upon the closing pages of the novel. He is consigned to the limbo of history, unable to enter the real world of the text. Lawrence has eliminated him. But he has not denied or forgotten him; in Aaron’s Rod he has composed his own studies on hysteria, and imagined his own one-to-one treatment with a psychic physician, in a revisionist account that consciously sets out to surpass the central tenets of psychoanalysis. Freud argued in Studies on Hysteria that hysteria was a dissociative condition caused by a repressed trauma in which the symptoms were somatised, and his cure was an abreaction through words that enabled psychic re-integration around an understanding of the recovered memory of the precipitating trauma. For Lawrence too hysteria was a dissociative condition caused by trauma; but as a cultural historian he saw the origins of that split in a society that valued the ideal life of the mind over the physical life of the body. Like Herbertson in battle or Lottie in marriage, people were living by ideals that traumatised them; alienated from the transformational power of their bodily unconscious, they became hysterically committed to an endless replay of shameful scenarios with no potential for creative growth. The phenomenon of repetition compulsion observed in war-shock proved a problem to Freud, since it contradicted his view of human beings as biologically driven by pleasure, and in 1920 he postulated an implausible death-instinct by way of solution. Lawrence, however, believed that people replayed the scenes of their trauma in an effort to digest them and move on. Herbertson is too damaged to do this, and so are Lottie, Angus Guest and the Italian expatriates, all hysterically stuck with what Freud would have called the secondary gains of their performances. Aaron may prove to be more fortunate; but as Lawrence’s ironic chapter-headings make clear, his cure does not lie with ‘talk’ or ‘words’. It lies with a restoration of the unconscious life of the body to its rightful primacy or, if that proves impossible, with a self-possession that refuses to act out the lies of a damaged emotional life.

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  231 The elaborate dream that opens the last chapter of the book marks the culmination of Aaron’s development in Aaron’s Rod, and the fact that the book ends with a dream signals again the importance of psychoanalysis in its absence. Lawrence is making his own contribution to the debate about dream-theory that had been intensifying in England since 1913 when Jung had rejected Freud’s view that dreams were disguised wish-fulfilments. They belonged, Jung argued, to a ‘process of comprehension by means of analogy’ through which we struggle to adapt to new conditions in life, ‘to grasp what is unknown and in the future, according to our mental understanding of what has gone before’.84 This Nietzschean responsiveness to the perennial struggle in people between progressive and regressive tendencies was also what appealed most strongly to Eder about Jung, as his review of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido made clear: the forward urge can be arrested both by conflicts in the conscious and in the unconscious. Refusal to execute something which is consciously waiting to be done stays creative work at the source; the wheels go on revolving round old phantasies – the result is a nothingness.85 Aaron’s Rod is shaped by the struggle of people to progress with their lives when stuck, and by their regressive circling around sterile fantasies when they fail; it is significant that the dream with which the book closes is a travel dream, revealing an Aaron who is finally readying himself to move on with his life. It is a dream not unlike the two dreams of an obsessional neurotic analysed by Eder in his paper to the Malta Medical Conference in 1916 – travelling dreams in which a man who had collapsed as a result of his father’s breakdown dreamed of pushing aside an incompetent pilot from a ship to save it, and later of fleeing from a stalled car by clambering over rocks to escape by sea. ‘When the unconscious of our patient has reached this’, Eder comments, ‘when he learns that he must surrender that which is infantile and immature in himself – that clinging to the father – that he must be master of himself, we have reached a new viewpoint’.86 Eder emphasises the symbolisation process, the ‘comprehension by means of analogy’, that characterises the mental work of the dream; his role as therapist is to facilitate the painful, self-sacrificial task of implementing its conclusions, furthering a work of self-development that is also a contribution to the development of civilisation. Only through such strenuous self-transformation, Jung believed, can people discover ‘those moments of peace and satisfaction which give the human being the priceless feeling that he has really lived his life’.87 Aaron’s dream, like the dreams of Eder’s patient, is also a travel dream whose materials are drawn from present difficulty, showing, in Jung’s words, ‘the subliminal picture of the psychological condition of the

232  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria individual in his waking state’.88 But Aaron’s unconscious is not foreseeing his future life-tasks; mechanically, by means of symbols, it is reliving the traumas of the past, the traumas associated with work, family and women that have caused his ‘black dog’ and blocked his progress through life. Any increase in ‘comprehension by means of analogy’ is in the reader, not in Aaron himself, who ‘quickly relinquished the effort’ to understand it (AR 288). Now for the first time the reader can fully grasp how Aaron felt his individuality was being consumed in his work in the mines; we can at last appreciate the depth of his guilt at leaving his wife and children, the pain and confusion caused by his subsequent sexual adventures and the terror he feels at Astarte, the Magna Mater. The dream, in the language of Fantasia, is one of Aaron’s ‘true soul-dreams’ (PFU 180), resulting from an obstruction in the nightly process of elimination that occurs when ‘something threatens us from the outer mechanical, or accidental death-world’ (PFU 178). The spontaneity of ‘the wakeful living soul’ is threatened by the ‘automatic process’ of mechanical living; and the resultant split in Aaron is embodied in the two dream-images of himself, one of which is stuck in the repetitive fantasies of the past and one of which wants to sail ahead in the ‘deep, unfathomable water’ of the future (AR 288). In symbolism that recalls the mechanisms of hysterical conversion, the conflict between the two halves of his personality is imaged psychosomatically in the bruising of that part of his body most characteristically hurt by jostling against other people, the elbow. Three times, symbolising Aaron’s three sexual relationships, the physical dream-self’s elbow is bruised whilst, anxiously, the spiritual dream-self looks on. Three times the physical dream-Aaron ignores the pain caused by the shallowness of his course; then suddenly he ‘changed his position as he sat, and drew in his arm’ (AR 288). Though ‘not aware of any need to do so’ (AR 288), spontaneously he changes position. It is not a question of comprehension or strenuous self-sacrificial adaptation, as Jung might have made it; it is an instinctive, unconscious movement of ‘the living wakeful soul’, of which Aaron remains quite unaware when, in the uncertain hour before morning, he lies barrenly awake. Yet the dream marks the moment when finally he begins to move on, ejecting the traumas of his past and putting behind him the depression, guilt, fear and anger that have dogged him. These were the feelings behind the cynicism that upset Lilly when Aaron lay ill, feelings that, like Lilly’s own ressentiment, bound Aaron to the past. But now, unconsciously during sleep, his spontaneous living soul overthrows the ‘accidental death-world’ imposed upon him, whose cultural authority, in Gross’s phrase, had penetrated into his ‘innermost self’.89 This is the moment of catharsis when, with one dream-movement of his elbow, the balance of forces begins to change, the hysterical split in his nature begins to heal. When Aaron awakens, something has changed in him, ‘that which was slowly breaking had finally shattered at last’ (AR 288). The terrorist bomb, destructive as it is, has expressed the destructiveness in his own

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  233 soul that is the necessary corollary of new creation; it has shattered the ties that bind him to the past. ‘If he had to give in’, he thinks to himself, ‘then it should be to no woman, and to no social ideal, and to no social institution’ (AR 290); he would give in only to Lilly. Suddenly however, as he fantasises about yielding to Lilly’s authority as a spiritual healer, Lilly himself arrives and starts to prescribe precisely such submission as a sovereign remedy against the hysterical illnesses of contemporary society. As Lilly talks, it quickly becomes clear there is a difference between Aaron’s fantasy of Lilly and the man himself. Aaron discovers in himself a profound physical resistance to him, originating either in his own jealous possessiveness, in Lilly’s wayward friendship or in something more fundamentally wrong with Lilly’s vision. ‘Aaron could not help it – Lilly put his back up’ (AR 292). There was something fantastic about his vision of leadership and discipleship. ‘“You’ll never get it”’, he says (AR 299). Whether Aaron will ever finally submit to Lilly’s authority, and what it might mean if he did, is left open at the end of the book, in an uncertainty that recalls the underlying difficulty of distinguishing the symptom of hysteria from its cure. ‘Nobody can be all right in mind, nowadays’, Lawrence had told Cynthia Asquith in 1917 (3L 157); there is no guarantee that Lilly too is not traumatised by the battle of the sexes, the war and the empty violent world it has bequeathed. His lengthy harangue at the end, as the chapter-title ‘Words’ makes clear, may simply replicate the incontinence of characters like Jim and Josephine; and its effect on Aaron is to lock him up once more in the laconic reserve that characterised his ‘black dog’ throughout the book. Here again Lawrence depicts the paradox of living beyond the known of social norms, in a world where no language has a monopoly of wisdom, and no-one may be certain of salvation. Late in the novel, when Lilly states his belief in male leadership, the socialist Levison accuses him of ‘the preposterous pretentiousness of a megalomaniac’ (AR 282). This term, 30 years old in 1920, boasted the authority of a newly prestigious academic psychiatry; Levison’s selfconfidence in judging Lilly rests on ‘the huge social power’ that he feels behind such diagnoses, confirming the normal and condemning the odd to prison or the asylum. Both socialists and psychiatrists claimed a monopoly of wisdom – and so too did the followers of Freud. In 1912, in his paper ‘The God Complex’, with Jung in his sights, Ernest Jones traced ‘megalomaniac fantasy’ to ‘an Oedipus situation in which the hero-son is a suffering saviour’.90 Tacitly he ascribed Jung’s defection to a Nietzschean desire for self-transformation symptomatic of oedipal revolt. Doubtless he would have identified the same complex in Gross, Eder and Lawrence too. In Aaron’s Rod the need for self-transformation is explored partly through the desire to travel. ‘“What’s the good of going to Malta?”’ Aaron asks Lilly. ‘“You’ll be the same there as you are here”’ (AR 103). Lilly disagrees: ‘“Do you think a cuckoo in Africa and a cuckoo in Essex is one and the same bird?”’ (AR 290). Lilly displays

234  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria the same ‘belief in self-creation’, the same ‘rebirth fantasies’ that Jones thought typical of an oedipally inspired megalomania.91 When he met Lawrence in 1917, Jones thought him a man in search of ‘disciples’92; in Aaron’s Rod he would have seen Lilly’s messianic sense of leadership, his masculinism, his misogyny, his aloofness, his ‘evanescent’ friendships (AR 289) and his misanthropic dislike of ‘the mob’ (AR 97) as compensatory fantasies of an author whose mother-love had denied him the ordinary satisfactions of sexual relationship. He would have seen Lilly’s megalomania as an attempt to prolong the oedipal sense of specialness when faced with the inevitable disillusionment of his sexual life. Confident in ‘the huge social power’ afforded by the psychoanalytic world-view, Jones adopted a patronising tone towards Lawrence in his memoirs. This was not the whole story; he enjoyed Lawrence too, despite his reservation about ‘his vital – all too vital – personality’.93 Perhaps he agreed with Freud, in his one known comment about Lawrence, that he seemed ‘“unsatisfied but a man of real power”’.94 Perhaps he felt as he did about Nietzsche, that Lawrence’s oedipal complex was ‘guided and controlled by valuable higher factors’ that gave his writing genuine ‘grandeur and sublimity’;95 but he also believed that the psychoanalyst, secure in his sense of the normal, was the best person to point this out. Yet psychoanalysis, with its ambition ‘to restore the abnormal mind to the “normal”’, is marginalised in Aaron’s Rod; its claim to universality is subverted by its absence from the text. Instead, Lawrence cultivates the odd and sides with the outsider, opening up the space to address the importance of hierarchy and inequality in human relationships. He displaces the normative discourse of psychoanalysis with a religious language celebrating creative power and charismatic leadership as values in their own right, mysteries irreducible to psychological terms. Within each person, says Lilly, the Holy Ghost of the individual self ‘puts forth new buds, and pushes past old limits, and shakes off a whole body of dying leaves’ (AR 296), in some people so powerfully that it commands the instinctive obeisance of others. Lilly’s delight in ‘the creative or religious motive’ undermines the scientific aspiration of psychoanalysis. ‘In a revolutionary and sovereign manner’, says Weber, ‘charismatic domination transforms all values (alles umwertend) and breaks all traditional and rational norms’.96 By proposing Lilly as a psychic physician, and by diagnosing male hysteria as a denial of the ‘creative or religious motive’, Aaron’s Rod deliberately transforms the rational norms and values of materialist medicine. It is a politically dangerous and chauvinist course that Lawrence has set, arrogating political significance to masculine charisma and creativity; and certainly he was venturing further than the Freud of 1908 who told Gross, not altogether truly: ‘We are doctors, and intend to remain doctors’. Freudian and Lawrentian discourses, we might say, inhabit different universes, and yet they have much to say to each other. From a Freudian

Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  235 perspective Lawrence is in denial of his oedipal origins, erecting a defensive idealisation of male power that produces the comparative weakness of the novel’s last chapter; Lilly’s harangue and what David Cavitch ironically calls his ‘apotheosis’, his transformation into ‘a Byzantine eikon’ (AR 299), do not easily convince.97 It is not understanding backwards, however, that matters to Lawrence but living forwards. ‘The thing to do is to get a move on’: old psychological charts are no use in navigating the ‘deep, unfathomable water’ of the future. Lawrence knew the risks he ran; he knew that he too, like Lilly, might be the victim of megalomania, hysteria, war-shock. But he also knew that self-knowledge gained through psychoanalysis could not generate the bodily aliveness that he wanted, and that sexual desire could not satisfy him if he lacked the self-possession to enjoy it. The self must first be established before relationship can be enjoyed. ‘The psychoanalysts, driving us back to the sexual consummation, always do us infinite damage’ (PFU 136), and he illustrated such damage in the hysterical illnesses of Jim Bricknell and Josephine Ford. Lawrence rejected the primacy of the sexual instinct and the universality of incestuous desire proposed by psychoanalysis. Increasingly he believed that his own difficulties were not sexual in origin, that they lay deeper than that, in the very origins of his selfhood. He had begun to explore those origins in the studies of infancy in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, and he would take up his search again in what would prove to be his final formal engagement with psychoanalytic writing, his review of Trigant Burrow’s The Social Basis of Consciousness in 1927.

Notes

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Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria  237









































238  Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria











































Conclusion In Search of the True Self: Trigant Burrow and Lawrence (1925–28)

Psychology of the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious were never intended to be Lawrence’s last word on psychoanalysis. ‘I’ve got another volume up my sleeve’, he teased his American readers in the epilogue to Fantasia (PFU 201), and it was this third book, he told Mabel Dodge Luhan, ‘that will really matter’ (4L 111). But in the event the book was never written because, as he told Trigant Burrow in 1925, the first two books ‘hardly sell at all, and only arouse dislike. I’m not going to bother any more about that side of things’ (5L 262). Yet despite this decision, Lawrence still had one last piece to write about psychoanalysis, and it was Trigant Burrow who prompted it. Since 1918 Burrow, with 16 published essays to his name, had fallen silent; he had undergone a personal and professional crisis, not unlike that experienced by Jung in 1912–16, and had been impelled to reassess the nature of his professional work and beliefs. The crisis had arisen when his ‘student-assistant’ Clarence Shields,1 annoyed by the authoritative manner of Burrow’s dream-interpretation, had challenged him to change places in the analysis, and piqued, Burrow had agreed, only in turn to resent the upstart authority of his assistant. After much reflection he concluded that psychoanalytic therapy was vitiated by the authority structures of so-called ‘normal’ society, and that it was the authoritarian structure of this ‘normal’ society, rather than repressed libido, that was the primary cause of neurotic illness. The grounds for this revision of Freudian theory lay in his long-standing idealisation of the preconscious, the pre-sexual state of harmony in which the infant lived with its mother, both before and after birth – a harmony, he believed, that was undisturbed by endopsychic conflict of any kind but that was fated to be disrupted by later demands for obedience. Burrow had reached a similar conclusion to that of Otto Gross that individual neurosis was inseparable from social structure. Where Gross had described parental authority as having the form ‘be lonely, or become like us’, Burrow saw it as couched in the form ‘be good if you want our approval’ – a moral bullying that merely instructs the child in self-interest. Time after time Burrow described such education as a Fall, a banishment from the paradisal continuum of primary identification with the mother and

240  Conclusion: In Search of the True Self an introduction to the self-seeking fallen world of self-consciousness. It fostered a compliance that denied the natural morality and creativity of the child’s physical life, together with a pursuit of social self-images that inhibited the expression of what he called – anticipating Winnicott  – ‘the wholly spontaneous gesture’. 2 Believing like Gross that man was born free but was everywhere in chains, that he was born whole but was everywhere in pieces and that his supposed ‘normality’ was pathogenic, he set out to reconstruct what he called the social basis of human consciousness. Simultaneously, believing that the authoritarianism of an individual psychoanalysis was harmful in so far as it reinforced the patient’s dependence on the analyst’s approval, he took the historic step of developing a strategy for group analysis, in which each member of the group would be free to analyse the various forms of repression and spurious social images that governed the attitudes and behaviour of them all. By the start of 1924 Burrow had worked out the practical methodology and theoretical basis of his new therapy, and was ready to launch them on the world; he had written a first draft of his book The Social Basis of Consciousness (1927) and, whilst looking for a publisher sympathetic to his approach, had prepared a series of addresses and articles in order to publicise it. As was his habit, he sent offprints of his articles to various people whom he hoped to interest, and amongst them, on 28 January 1925, was Lawrence whose ‘own delightful essays on psychoanalysis’, he said, had been so appreciative of Burrow’s earlier work (5L 261n). One of the two essays he sent was ‘Social Image versus Reality’ (1924), with which Lawrence was ‘in entire sympathy’ (5L 261–2); the other, ‘A Relative Concept of Consciousness: An Analysis of Consciousness in its Ethnic Origin’ (January 1925) discussed the relativity of all human knowledge, and Lawrence – whom Burrow knew had already written in Fantasia of the necessity for ‘a theory of human relativity’ (PFU 72) – found it equally sympathetic. His gloss on Burrow’s central argument that ‘we tend to explain life rather than to live it’ was memorable3: ‘In my opinion one can never know: and never – never understand. One can but swim, like a trout in a quick stream’ (5L 262). Lawrence’s readiness to agree with Burrow about the fatuity of knowing would have been intensified by the fact that, having returned from Mexico to his New Mexico ranch, he was once again living in close proximity to Mabel Dodge Luhan, a woman addicted to a fruitless pursuit of self-knowledge. Since 1916 she had undergone intermittent analyses with Smith Ely Jelliffe and subsequently with the Freudian loyalist A.A. Brill, with whom she retained a lifelong connexion; her compulsion to find a satisfactory attitude towards herself had already provoked Lawrence, long before they met, to some of his ugliest outbursts against psychoanalysis. ‘I rather hate therapy altogether’ he told her in 1921 (4L 142). ‘I believe that a real neurotic is a half devil’, he added, ‘but a cured neurotic is a perfect devil’, bewitched by the illusory possibility

Conclusion: In Search of the True Self  241 of a ‘perfect conscious and automatic’ self-control. She should send Brill to hell, he thought, ‘and all the analytic therapeutic lot’ (4L 182). Lawrence’s beliefs impressed Mabel greatly, and for much of the rest of her life she was torn between the competing claims of psychoanalytic self-knowledge and Lawrence’s ideal of spontaneous liveliness. During his absence in Mexico, however, in the spring and summer of 1923, and his subsequent visit to England, she met the Spanish anthropologist Jaime de Angulo who had worked with Jung in the summer of 1923, and she fell under his spell, as she had earlier fallen under Lawrence’s. ‘I liked the scarey, exciting world of Jung and Jaime’, she wrote. ‘I sent for all Jung’s books and read them, but was disappointed not to find more thrills in them, so I had to depend upon Jaime for the more esoteric portions of the new system’.4 Both she and de Angulo were drawn to Jung’s interest in occult symbolism, and they made ‘quite a little madhouse’, she said, discussing issues such as the meaning of the patterns cast by their furniture on the floor. Her letters to Lawrence fizzed with what she called her ‘psychoanalytic rigmarole’, 5 but Lawrence was unimpressed: ‘Jung is very interesting, in his own fat muddled mystical way,’ he conceded, out of his own interest in the occult as a symbolic reading of the religious relationship between body and world; but he immediately qualified his interest: ‘Although he may be an initiate and a thrice-sealed adept, he’s soft somewhere, and I’ve no doubt you’d find it easy to bring his heavy posterior with a bump down off his apple-cart’ (5L 540). Mabel’s enthusiasm for the Jungian typologies of introvert and extrovert fared no better: ‘No classifications whatever mean much to me’, he wrote (4L 573). I can’t answer about those diagrams and Jung introvert stuff – it really means nothing to me. I don’t really like the mental excitation of it all. Nor the sort of excitation that comes out of de Angulo’s letter, and that business of Clarence and the puppy and the ‘anima’. It all seems to me a false working-up, and an inducement to hysteria and insanity. I know what lies at the back of it all: the same indecent desire to have everything in the will and the head. Life itself comes from elsewhere. (4L 585) It was against this background of Mabel’s furiously unproductive ‘mental excitation’ that Lawrence, back in New Mexico in 1925, encountered Trigant Burrow’s recent work and responded with sympathy and genuine intellectual interest to his quiet critique of the human rage to understand. There were more pamphlets to follow in 1926, enclosed in letters dated 6 May and 25 October. The first letter may have miscarried, but the second arrived, together with the essay that would constitute the first

242  Conclusion: In Search of the True Self chapter of The Social Basis of Consciousness: ‘Psychoanalysis in Theory and in Life’, first published the month before. Lawrence acknowledged its receipt in a letter written on Christmas Day 1926, saying he enjoyed its peaceableness and abstention from bullying. ‘It is true’, he wrote, ‘the essential self is so simple – and nobody lets it be’ (5L 611). He was responding to Burrow’s picture of a bodily life grounded in the preconscious, with ‘the organic unity of personality rising naturally from the harmony of function that pertains biologically to the primary infant psyche’; he warmed to his sense that behind the neurotic craving and exorbitant sexuality of modern civilisation, life could be ‘one of quiet flow’.6 Yet amid the appreciation, there was criticism too; he criticised the tortuousness of his prose (‘like Laocoön snakes’) and, with his novelist’s slant on the ‘personal equation’ that Burrow discussed, he wanted to place him racially (surely he was ‘not Jewish at all’). On 7 February 1927 Burrow replied, confessing his poor prose style, declaring his ‘depleted’ French ancestry and enclosing yet another sheaf of offprints, including his most recent, ‘Speaking of Resistances’ (1927), together with ‘The Heroic Role’ (1926) and ‘The Reabsorbed Affect and its Elimination’ (1926), where he defended the role of group analysis in helping people see through the absolutism of their attitudes and values to the prejudices behind them. Probably included also was ‘The Laboratory Method in Psychoanalysis, Its Inception and Development’ (1926), the only one of these new papers to allude to Burrow’s 1917 essay on ‘The Genesis and Meaning of “Homosexuality” and its Relation to the Problem of Introverted Mental States’, an essay that Lawrence mentions in response as something of which ‘I’ve long wanted to know the meaning’ (6L 100). It was a characteristically large bundle that Burrow sent, and it provoked Lawrence’s fullest reply to date. It begins with sardonic delight in the satirical vision that Burrow provoked in him, of a world of egotistical bullies bound together by mutual resistance – a word which, according to Edward Glover, Burrow uses in an analytically ‘superficial and wholly inadequate sense’.7 But then Lawrence’s tone deepens and, picking up Burrow’s pictures of dissociation, he declares that his own problems lie in ‘the absolute frustration of my primeval societal instinct’ (6L 99). This ‘societal instinct’, he says, is ‘much deeper than ‘sex instinct’, and ‘there is no repression of the sexual individual comparable to the repression of the societal man in me’ – a repression, he adds, which is enforced both by his own ego and that of everyone around him. It is not quite loneliness that he feels – the ‘lonesome aloneness’ that so troubled Mabel Dodge Luhan8 – but a sense of alienation, of dissociation from his fellow-man. He is, he concludes, weary of his own individuality and nauseated by everyone else’s. This striking confession, made by a sick man confined to his bed, encapsulates Lawrence’s mature judgement of Freudian oedipal theory. He sidesteps the challenge of the deliberate broadening of the concept

Conclusion: In Search of the True Self  243 of sexuality that Freud had introduced; his concern lies elsewhere. He believes, with Burrow, that things can go wrong between mother and child at a pre-oedipal stage, damaging the child’s later capacity to form relationships of all kinds, not least by sexualising them. As Gilbert Noon intimated, ‘“perhaps something else is always being perverted into sex”’ (MN 128). It is this sense of a ‘primeval’ infantile disturbance underlying his later oedipal difficulties that formed the core of his disagreement with Freud; and he concludes by wishing to meet someone who has gone through Burrow’s ‘laboratory’ and become ‘unrepressed’ – if, he adds sceptically, there is any such person. What Lawrence relishes about Burrow’s papers is their critique of psychoanalysis; he loves, he says, to watch him ‘pull the loose legs out of the tripods of the p-a-ytical pythonesses’ (6L 99), to see him demolish the claims to scientific authority with which they disguised their actual reliance on the personal equation. Lawrence would have responded too to Burrow’s sense that a cure is no cure if it only returns a patient back to the world of self-conscious bullies amongst whom he had already fallen ill. Yet, alongside this relish, doubts are beginning to form in Lawrence’s mind, crystallising around Burrow’s own ambivalence about the scientific status of his own so-called ‘laboratory’ experiments with group therapy. Do the numbers in a group rescue the observational process from the subjectivity of the personal equation? What is the epistemological status of his own kind of analytic work? Lawrence’s objection is forthright at this point: ‘mental science anyhow can’t exist – any more than the goose can lay the golden egg’. With similar directness he also rejects Burrow’s idea of a recoverable harmony amongst men: ‘men will never agree – Can’t – in their “subjective sense perceptions”’. Thus, whilst Lawrence remained curious about Burrow – and informed about psychoanalysis, wondering whether Burrow might be in Europe for the forthcoming ‘p.-a-thing in Innsbruck’ (the Tenth International Congress of Psychoanalysis, to be held on 1–2 September) – he was also beginning to signal his reservations. Meanwhile, on 12 July, the day before Lawrence wrote this letter, Burrow had written to say that he had asked his publisher to send him a copy of his book The Social Basis of Consciousness, after four hard years finally accepted for publication. Lawrence acknowledged its receipt in a long letter of 3 August and promised to review it; and this review, probably written that same day or the next, is Lawrence’s last published comment on psychoanalysis. It was a wholly favourable review, designed ‘to help’ the book (6L 120) – as indeed it did.9 It has three main points to make, after an introduction that praises Burrow’s independence, his originality and his honesty in thinking through an initial suspicion that there was something ‘vitally wrong’ with Freudian theory (IR 331); it is an honesty, says Lawrence, rare amongst men who profess theories about life.

244  Conclusion: In Search of the True Self The first part of the review – a résumé, Lawrence calls it – summarises Burrow’s critique of the psychoanalytic method as fundamentally self-contradictory since the analyst, whilst professing to free the patient to live more fully, merely confines him to the Procrustean bed of a mechanical theory. The treatment represses the patient whilst confirming a like repression in the analyst, who unconsciously substitutes an image of life for life itself. Theory, though useful as a description of life, cannot be applied directly to it, to master a living situation. The theory that concerns Lawrence particularly – although, as Neil Reeve and others have pointed out, Burrow himself says ‘very little’ (IR 525) about it – is, of course, that of the Oedipus complex. This is Lawrence’s own particular hobby-horse, and he refers to it variously as the incest-motive, the incesttheory or the incest-complex. They are names that greatly simplify the range of issues described by the Oedipus complex, with its sensitivity to the range of possibilities facing a child of one sex brought up by adults in a world of two sexes; but Lawrence’s cavalier treatment of it illustrates the depth of his own conviction that he was damaged pre-oedipally. As he puts it towards the end of the review, ‘A man is not neurasthenic or neurotic because he loves his mother. If he desires his mother, it is because he is neurotic, and the desire is merely a symptom. The cause of the neurosis is further to seek’ (IR 336). Second, Lawrence continues, the ‘neurosis of modern life’ is caused not by sexual repression but by a sense of separateness alienating men and women both from one another and themselves. If there is no single theory to account for this alienation, Burrow’s reasoning is nevertheless ‘much deeper and more vital’ than Freud’s (IR 332): he attributes it to the current state of human evolution, to the Fall of human beings into self-consciousness, which leaves them profoundly aware of an isolation for which the only remedy is more consciousness still. At the same time they are haunted by nostalgia for ‘the old togetherness of the far past’, which Burrow calls the preconscious (IR 333). The only way to recover that togetherness, according to Burrow, is through group analysis, where the hostility driving the one-to-one struggle for dominance in Freudian psychoanalysis may be more easily dispersed. It is the absolutism of the independent individual that must be broken. The third part of the review presents the material that is most appealing to Lawrence in its satirical portrayal of so-called normality. In our isolated self-consciousness we live according to an ideal image of ourselves  – not spontaneously from the inside out, but automatically from the outside in. This, says Lawrence, is what might properly be called living from the ‘vicious’ Freudian unconscious (IR 334). If neurotics are the rebels, normal people are more neurotic still, as the facts of the late war and of bolshevism and class hatred clearly show. As Rosemary Reeves Davies puts it, normal people have substituted ‘social images for genuine human response’,10 and nowhere is this more visible than in

Conclusion: In Search of the True Self  245 their sexual life. Men must be very male, women very female: they are all ‘acting up’, driven by self-interest, seeking to satisfy their own image of themselves. The ‘true self’, on the other hand, ‘would seek to meet the other’ (IR 335) in sex, and would look for the flow of a real relation. Lawrence and Burrow are one in this celebration of the biological bedrock of the human being. ‘The true self is not aware that it is a self’, says Lawrence. ‘A bird as it sings sings itself. But not according to a picture. It has no idea of itself’ (IR 336). The aim of the analyst should not be, as in Freudian therapy, to return the patient to so-called normality; it should be ‘to liberate his patient from his own image, from his horror of his own isolation and the horror of the “stoppage” of his real vital flow’. It should be to re-establish connexion with his true self. Burrow is right, Lawrence concludes, to seek to build ‘trust among a group of people, or many people’; people ‘must get back into touch’ (IR 336). It is a skilful, intelligent, beautifully written review that, whilst avoiding the more technical discussions in Burrow’s book, nevertheless does full justice to its vision; and yet Lawrence’s letter of 3 August is the richer document. It begins by declaring Burrow’s book ‘extremely good’, and reaffirms the three central claims of the review – that the critique of psychoanalysis is ‘to the quick’, that the ailment of modern life lies in our being ‘cut off’ and that the analysis of sexuality is ‘exactly it’ (6L 113). The book, he says, is ‘most in sympathy with me of any book I’ve read for a long time’ (6L 115). But there is scepticism and criticism in the letter too, withheld from the review, that create its interest. In the first place, Lawrence clearly feels a measure of scepticism about Burrow’s method: ‘I wish I saw a little clearer how you get over the cut-offness’, he says carefully, even whilst admitting he suffers ‘badly’ from having ‘no real human relations’ and would like to visit Burrow’s clinic one day (6L 113). David Ellis has noted ‘how vague and evasive Burrow is at the points where he needed to be most constructive’ – ‘hazy’ is Edward Glover’s word11 – and his failure to illustrate his therapy in action, to provide the group equivalent of a case-history, is one of the great absences from his book. Second, despite what Lawrence says in his review about establishing trust amongst ‘many people – if possible, all the people in the world’ (IR 336), he clearly regards Burrow’s vision of a future harmony amongst people as utopian. ‘There will never be a millennium’, he says (6L 113); ambivalence cannot be educated into general good-will, and Burrow’s recommendation of forgiveness and self-forgiveness is no way to set about it. People’s emotions will always fluctuate and set them at odds with one another: ‘Men were never, in the past, fully societal – and they never will be in the future’. Third, astutely, he senses a deep tension in Burrow between the scientist and the philosopher or artist and, analysing the analyst, he interprets his occasionally ‘excruciating’ prose style as an expression of his ‘deep natural resistance’ to the language of science. It was Burrow’s conviction, his passionate willingness to run

246  Conclusion: In Search of the True Self with the relative truth of his vision, that impressed the novelist in Lawrence: ‘one must use words like believe’, he wrote emphatically (6L 113). In reply Burrow confirmed Lawrence’s diagnosis of this ‘unresolved conflict’ within him, although later in life he would take a scientific direction of which he suspected Lawrence would have made ‘short shrift’.12 Lawrence has two further criticisms to make of Burrow’s rationalism: first, he thinks the only way to re-establish relationship with his fellowmen is through shared religious feeling for the universe, and second, he doubts Burrow’s faith in the possibility of developing, through group analysis, a fully harmonious marriage relationship between men and women. Lawrence effectively turns against Burrow his own vision of human dissociation, and implies that human sexuality may be tragically flawed at its root. ‘There is a fundamental antagonism between the mental cognitive mode and the naïve or physical or sexual mode of consciousness’, he writes (6L 114), an endopsychic conflict beyond ambivalence that makes it impossible to have a mental relation with a woman and simultaneously to love her. This is not merely an unconscious expression of Lawrence’s own dissociation and his subsequent oedipal dilemma; it is also a statement about the problematic of self-consciousness and its ambiguous role in pleasurable experience. ‘How to regain the naïve or innocent soul – how to make it the man within man – your “societal”: and at the same time keep the cognitive mode for defences and adjustments and “work” – voila!’ (6L 114) The Fall into self- consciousness, Lawrence suspects, may have been more fatal for human happiness than Burrow allows. Burrow wrote a long letter in reply, invoking Darwin and Kropotkin to confirm his view that man was once ‘fully societal’, and analysing Lawrence’s ‘cut-offness’ as the consequence of his own artificial image of himself; such self-alienation, he said, represses the liveliness of our organism ‘with its feelings and instincts and its unending joy of life’ (6L 115n). What Lawrence made of this letter, or of the one that followed it, thanking him for his review and enclosing yet more offprints, we don’t know; in his reply, dated 15 March 1928, he merely thanks Burrow for the letters and ‘little books’, but ignores their contents (6L 324). Perhaps the moment of their closeness had passed, and certainly his interest in psychoanalysis had faded. As he had told Mabel Dodge Luhan the previous May, in response to some of Jung’s essays that she had sent him, ‘I’m sort of tired of so many words. One changes – changes inside oneself – and then old interests die out’ (6L 57–8). What Lawrence does instead, in promising to send Burrow order forms for Lady Chatterley’s Lover, is to offer his own remedy for modern alienation, his own way of getting back into touch with one another: ‘The way to gentle re-union is phallic, and through tenderness, don’t you think? – between men and women, and men and men, altogether’ (6L 324). Lawrence is going his own way, returning perhaps to the openness to bisexuality seen in the

Conclusion: In Search of the True Self  247 1919 Whitman essay, restoring religious reverence to male potency and, in celebrating tenderness, emphasising the importance of power kindly used. This is his final word to Burrow, and with it their correspondence, and Lawrence’s writing about psychoanalysis, both come to an end. * The sympathy that Lawrence felt for Burrow’s vision in The Social Basis of Consciousness is the expression of a deeper kinship between the two men. They shared, as Burrow put it later, ‘a common ground of outlook plus a certain accord in the inner sense of values’;13 and the area of that common ground had first been marked out in early childhood. Both men had been brought up by depressed mothers who, in their search for comfort and corroboration, had aroused their sons into premature self-consciousness; like Anna in The Rainbow, prematurely called upon ‘to uphold with her childish might the broken end of the arch’ (R 91), they had been called upon to identify with their mothers in their unhappy marriages and to restore the liveliness they lacked. If this had the advantage of stimulating intelligence and empathy in them – so that, in the words of Fantasia, their sensitivity flared up ‘like a flame in oxygen’ (PFU 149) – it did so only by developing centres of living in them that were at odds with the living processes of their own bodies. Their excess of liveliness was simultaneously a dissociation from themselves, their sense of specialness a dissociation from other people. They lost what they each identified as their ‘true self’, and spent much of their life searching to recover it. Their concern was both for their own creativity and for their relationships, and they both felt threatened by the compliance expected in social living. Hence the appeal of Burrow’s social criticism to Lawrence, with its picture of a neurotic world misled by the social images and spurious moralities wielded by empty authorities. If Burrow was more idealistic that Lawrence in his nostalgia for the preconscious life of the past, as well as in his faith in the inherent human capacity for future harmonious living, they were nevertheless at one in their critique of the present. It is no surprise that both men were dissatisfied with contemporary psychoanalysis, and set out to refashion it in their own image; Freud’s work on the neuroses failed to provide them with a picture adequate to their sense of their own suffering or to their values and, being temperamentally averse to all external authority, they condemned its pretensions to systematic theory and also its methodology, which they thought bred narcissistic self-absorption. They sought a psychoanalysis of health, grounded in what Gross had called ‘the essential personal style of the individual’,14 to be realised by a process that Jung would later call individuation; their concern for creative living, for the formative power of relationship and for the devastating effects of social alienation found no

248  Conclusion: In Search of the True Self echo in the language of the Freudians. They understood from their own experience that such alienation originated at a pre-sexual stage, in the dyadic relationship between mother and child, to which oedipal disturbances were subsequent and secondary; and they understood too that such alienation could only be understood fully in its social history, and that no individual cure is incomplete without a social group to sustain it. As Gross had argued, what was needed, in order to preserve das Eigene of the creative self against the alien encroachments of das Fremde, was a socio-political psychoanalysis critical of the authoritarian culture of the society in which it operated. It was not until the second generation of psychoanalysts following Freud, in particular those associated with the English school of objectrelations psychoanalysis who had grown up within the same late romantic culture as Lawrence and Burrow, that a language emerged adequate to deal with the issues raised by their writings. Chief amongst these analysts was Donald Winnicott, himself the son of a depressed mother who grew up with ‘the conviction that it was up to him to bring her back to life’.15 Winnicott described memorably the burden of the child whose task was to be alive and to look alive and to communicate being alive: ‘To be alive is all. It is a constant struggle to get to the starting point and to keep there. No wonder there are those who make a special business of existing and who turn it into a religion’.16 The effort required to ‘meet what is to be expected’ builds up a False Self in the child, he added, and constitutes ‘an intolerable handicap to the immature ego in its function of integrating’. Creativity becomes subordinate to compliance, and the True Self – or psyche-soma, as Winnicott also calls it – is drained of spontaneity and increasingly susceptible to a haunting sense of the unreality of its own experience. What Winnicott provides is a comprehensive developmental theory that, despite its cultural and social conservatism, does full analytic justice to the alienation that troubled Lawrence and Burrow; it is a culmination of both the cultural and the psychoanalytic critiques they evolved out of their personal experience, and embodies the values with which they tried to heal themselves. When Lawrence and Burrow emphasised the importance of creativity, the spontaneous gesture and the true bodily self in their struggle against pathogenic compliance, they were grappling with their own sense of alienation – or, in another language, a schizoid sense of unreality  – which would prove to be as defining a characteristic of twentiethcentury life as hysteria had been of the century before. There is a temptation in discussing Lawrence and psychoanalysis to remain fixated on the lack of resolution of the oedipal dilemma presented in Sons and Lovers; yet even in Sons and Lovers Paul’s difficulties had begun in infancy, even prenatally, in a strained two-person relationship which lies beyond the usual reach of Freudian oedipal theory. Like Gross and Burrow, Lawrence understood the importance of what Winnicott called

Conclusion: In Search of the True Self  249 the facilitating environment, and sensing that his own difficulties were pre-oedipal in origin, he attempted through his writing to understand the nature of his alienation and, through self-analysis, to recover his ‘true self’, the male bodily psyche-soma that had become unbalanced in infancy. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, in their concern for creativity and spontaneity, for the balance of relationships between love and hate, and the proper roles of the intellect and will, are perhaps best read as attempts to work towards some such developmental theory as that elaborated later by Winnicott; if they are too subjective and poetic where psychoanalysis had been too objective and scientific, if the tradition they follow is theosophy rather than psychoanalysis and if in this they embody the cultural cut-offness they were designed to heal, they nevertheless belong firmly to an intermediate stage between classical and object-relations psychoanalysis. Marion Milner, one of the leading object-relations analysts and a close friend and colleague of Winnicott’s, paid tribute to Lawrence’s work when she used the title of one of his Pansies for her own major contribution to the study of schizophrenia, The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a Psycho-Analytic Treatment (1969); and it was Lawrence’s emphasis on the importance of ‘direct contact with the undifferentiated sea of one’s own body awareness’ (52) that attracted her.17 Despite the wayward, hubristic subjectivity that marred his efforts to influence the course of psychoanalytic history, Lawrence exerted an important indirect influence: he was the most powerful voice of his generation to argue for the psychosomatic integrity of the human being, and for the importance of direct spontaneous contact with what Milner calls ‘one’s own body awareness’. His ideas of politics and gender have dated and become offensive; but, more than any other writer of the time, his critique of Freudian rationalism helped keep alive the cultural values that enabled a later generation of psychoanalysts to complete the doctrinal revision towards which he had aspired.

Notes 1 The phrase was Burrow’s, in his book The Social Basis of Consciousness (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1927), p. xv; the italics are the sarcastic gloss of Edward Glover in his review of that book in The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. X (1929), p. 111. 2 In an unpublished paper of 1928; see From Psychoanalysis to Group Analysis: The Pioneering Work of Trigant Burrow, ed. by Edi Gatti Pertegato and Giorgio Orghe Pertegato (London: Karnac, 2013), p. 1. 3 ‘A Relative Concept of Consciousness: An Analysis of Consciousness in its Ethnic Origin’ (1925), in ibid., p. 78. 4 Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos (London: Martin Secker, 1933), p. 137. 5 Ibid., p. 143. 6 ‘Psychoanalysis in Theory and in Life’, in From Psychoanalysis to Group Analysis, pp. 102, 116.

250  Conclusion: In Search of the True Self





Index

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables; italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abercrombie, Lascelles 56 Adler, Alfred 74, 80, 87, 124, 130, 141, 207 Aeschylus Oresteia 44, 112 Die Aktion 7, 124 Angelides, Steven 138 Angulo, Jaime de 241 Asquith, Cynthia 114, 162, 187, 226, 233 Bacon, Francis 188 Bair, Deirdre 168 Balbert, Peter 96, 137 Baron, Carl 46, 56 Baron, Helen 32, 35, 42, 51, 56 Barr, William 218 Baudelaire, Charles 213–4, 216, 221 Bechhofer, C.E. 115 Beizer, Janet 218 Bell, Michael 87 Beresford, J.D. 56 Berman, Jeffrey 53, 58 Blake, William 34, 115, 160 Blanchard, Lydia 120, 125, 204–5 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna 155–6, 164 Brewster, Achsah 185 Brill, Abraham A. 75, 240–1 Buitenhuis, Peter 226 Burke, Edmund 174, 202 Burrow, Trigant 134, 169–71, 173–4, 177, 196, 228, 239–48; ‘far more Jungian than Freudian’ 170–1; group analysis 240; papers sent to DHL 240; preconscious 170, 239; psychoanalysis, critique of 239; spontaneity 171, 240

WORKS ‘The Genesis and Meaning of “Homosexuality”’ 242 ‘Notes with Reference to Freud, Jung and Adler’ 170 ‘The Origin of the Incest-Awe’ 169–71 The Social Basis of Consciousness 196, 235, 240, 242–3 Burrows, Louie 32, 56 Campbell, Gordon 73, 82 Cannan, Mary 140 Carlyle, Thomas 198 Carpenter, Edward 39, 85, 119, 137 Carswell, Catherine 154, 197 Carswell, Gordon 166 Carswell, John 73 Cavitch, David 235 Chambers, Jessie 36, 41–2, 51, 60 Colie, Rosalie 158 Collings, Ernest 66, 70 Conrad, Joseph 15, 21; Heart of Darkness 20, 23, 164 Cooper, James Fenimore 157, 169 Corke, Helen 85 Cowan, James 58, 86, 118, 137 Cox, Murray 221 Damasio, Antonio 159, 186 Dana, Richard Henry 187 Davies, Rosemary Reeves 244 Delany, Paul 134 Delavenay, Emile 119 De Quincey, Thomas 197 Derrida, Jacques 70 Dervin, Daniel 158, 171, 190

252 Index Dostoevsky, Fyodor 118, 125, 139–40, 143 du Maurier, George 214, 224 Dunlop, Sir Thomas 65 Eder, David 31–2, 72–6, 78–82, 87, 90–1, 141, 164–5, 208–10; attempts neutrality in Freud/Jung quarrel 74; break with Freud 80–2; champions Jung (1914–23) 82, 209–10; creative unconscious 81, 164, 179, 209; discusses psychoanalysis with DHL (1914) 73; dreams 231; fictionalised in Kangaroo 73; intimacy with DHL (1917) 155–6; men and women as different species 132; neurotics, value of 225; theosophy 155–6, 164; view of DHL (1933) 153; war-shock 208–10 WORKS ‘Address on the Psycho-Pathology of the War Neuroses’ 82, 208, 211, 231 ‘A Case of Obsession and Hysteria treated by the Freud Psycho-Analytic Method’ 75 ‘The Conflicts in the Unconscious of the Child’ (with Edith Eder) 178 The Endowment of Motherhood 31, 74–5 ‘Psychological Perspectives’ 82, 88, 91–2, 104, 145, 152, 231 ‘The Present Position of PsychoAnalysis’ 74, 91, 130, 141, 206 ‘The “Unconscious” Mind of the Child’ (with Edith Eder) 178–9 War-Shock 82, 208 Eder, Edith 73, 75, 81, 155, 166, 178–9, 186 Eggert, Paul 111 Eissler, K.R. 50 Eliot, T.S. 138, 216 Ellis, David 175, 179–80, 184, 245 Ellis, Havelock 31, 137 Ferenczi, Sándor 17, 25, 31, 82 Fernihough, Anne 88, 96, 144–5, 160 Flaubert, Gustave 213–4 Forster, E.M., Howard’s End 118 Forsyth, David 31, 208 Frank, Leonhard 16, 18, 117 Franklin, Benjamin 161 Freud, Anna 9

Freud, Sigmund 1, 4, 7, 11–12, 35, 40, 45, 48, 175; abreaction 22; analysis of Gross 23–4; antagonism between primary and secondary processes 155, 159–60; bisexuality 85; connects Oedipus Rex and Hamlet 44; depoliticisation of psychoanalysis 7, 234; hysteria 206–7, 211, 213; infantile sexuality 171–2; Inzest-Scheu 172; Oedipus complex 57, 92, 137; religion 85; repression in splitting 40; reputation in England 31–2, 54; sadism 68, 123, 126; symbolism 103; unconscious, nature of 153–4; view of Eder 75, 81; view of Lawrence as writer 234; vitality depleted by hostility to id 160 WORKS Beyond the Pleasure Principle 186 Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ 160 The Ego and the Id 59 Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria 11–12 The Interpretation of Dreams 44, 161, 187 ‘Introduction to Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses’ 206 ‘Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work’ 25 ‘A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men’ 60 Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer) 211, 213, 230 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 68, 149n67, 149n78 Totem and Taboo 92, 112, 172 ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’ 61, 93 Frick, Ernst 3–4, 6–7, 26, 45, 111, 201 Fussell, Paul 222 Galenbeck, Susan Carlsen 46, 49 Garnett, David 69 Garnett, Edward 34, 41, 46, 51–4, 57, 60, 67–8, 182, 187 Girard, René 70 Glover, Edward 208, 242, 245 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 14, 53, 197–200, 204; Faust 80, 197–9 Granofsky, Ronald 206

Index  253 Green, Martin 3, 5, 7, 113, 117–18, 139, 146 Gross, Frieda 3, 5–7, 20–1, 26, 31, 111, 124, 146, 153 Gross, Hans 4–5, 9, 117–18, 228 Gross, Otto CONCERNS Ausleben 115, 144, 175; biological sociology 83; bisexuality 10; body, belief in 13, 17, 19, 21–2; Decadenceepoche 104, 115–16; Degeneration nach oben 8, 116, 131, 138; das Dritte (relationship as third thing) 10, 65, 95, 123, 125, 131; drive to relate/drive for independence 9–10, 159, 189–90; das Eigene/ das Fremde 9, 12, 25, 66, 124, 154, 170; die Erotik 19–21, 199; free love 10; German culture criticised 14, 19, 21, 199; homosexuality 10, 69, 135–6; individualism 9, 12, 21, 247; loneliness 9, 14, 17; neurosis, socio-political origins 69, 239; neurotic, cowardice of 76; neurotic, value of 183, 225; ‘new ethic’ 7–13, 22, 46–8, 50; Oedipus complex rejected 13, 58; patriarchy and Konstellation-Vergewaltigung (rape constellation) 9, 12, 69, 119–20, 123–30; psychoanalysis, critique of 10–13, 58, 160; psychoanalysis, politicisation of 10–11, 13, 124; sado-masochism 68–9; Sexualneid (sexual envy) 69, 123; sublimation 17, 48, 175; transference, opposition to 11; typology 7–8, 80, 116–7, 146 LIFE affair with Else Jaffe 6; affair with Frieda Weekley 3–4, 6; analysis with Freud and Jung 23–4; cocaine addiction 5; correspondence with Frieda Weekley 13–18; early life 4–7; with Else Jaffe 18–21; erotic creed as flight from love 52; ‘fanaticism’ 18, 20, 23; fictionalised in Twilight in Italy, in Mr Noon 195, 200–2;

meets Webers 6; relationship with father 4–6, 8, 25 WORKS ‘Anmerkungen zu einer neuen Ethik’ 28n30, 69, 105n1, 135, 149n61 Die Cerebrale Sekundärfunktion (1902) 7 Die Cerebrale Sekundärfunktion (1907) 8, 116 Drei Aufsätze über den inneren Konflikt 7, 189–90 Elterngewalt 12–13 Das Freud’sche Ideogenitätsmoment 6, 8–9, 116–17 ‘Ludwig Rubiners “Psychoanalyse”’ 27n20, 139 ‘Notiz über Beziehungen’ 28n30, 108n102, 148n42 ‘Die Psychoanalyse oder wir Kliniker’ 28n32 Über Destruktionssymbolik 7, 124–5, 130, 159, 189–90 Über psychopathische Minderwertigkeiten 69 ‘Zur Überwindung der kulturellen Krise’ 28n31, 123, 148n35 Haeckel, Ernst 77–8 Haegert, John 70 Hardy, Thomas 60, 72, 84, 86, 88; Jude the Obscure 54, 94 Harrison, Jane 83–4, 90 Hart, Bernard 31, 50, 207 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 187 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) 156, 163, 173, 181, 218–20 Heuer, Gottfried 170 Hinz, Evelyn 178, 180 Hobson, Harold 48, 52 Hopkin, Sallie 65 Hough, Graham 55–6 Howe, Marguerite Beede 58 Huebsch, Benjamin 153, 158, 162, 164 Hueffer, Ford Madox 41 Hurwitz, Emanuel 10, 12, 23 Hyde, G.M. 37, 66, 91, 137, 206, 225 Ibsen, Henrik 14–15, 18, 33, 60, 66, 86, 95, 129 Ingersoll, Earl G. 134

254 Index Jaffe, Edgar 6–7, 124, 195, 197 Jaffe, Else 6–7, 13, 16–17, 51, 53, 111, 114, 124, 135–6, 195, 197–9; correspondence with OG 18–21; criticises OG 17, 20–1, 71, 199–200, 202 Jaffe, Peter 111 James, William 84, 159, 180 Jelliffe, Smith Ely 240 Jones, Ernest 122, 124, 144, 153–5, 164, 168, 171, 188, 225, 233–4; affair with Frieda Gross 31, 124, 153; Eder ‘defects’ to Jung 74–5, 80–1; essay on Hamlet 31–2, 112 Jung, C.G. 5, 7, 11, 35, 90, 101, 103, 115, 239, 241; aetiology of mental illness 77, 101, 189, 206–7; analysis of Gross 23–24, 31, 35; art as constructive 80, 152; break with Freud 76–8; creative living 78–80, 84, 170, 179; desexualisation of libido 76; dreams 79, 231; incest theory 78, 92, 167, 172, 174; individuation 77, 247; psyche as transition 145; regression 77–8, 115; religion 79, 85; symbols not necessarily sexual 79, 103, 162, 203; typology 7, 80, 118–19, 183; visits England (1913–14) 79–80; visits England (1919) 168 WORKS Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (ed. Constance Long) 82, 118; quoted 76, 79, 90, 101, 103, 152, 203 The Theory of Psychoanalysis (The Fordham Lectures) 76, 174, 179, 183 Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (Psychology of the Unconscious) 76–8, 80, 84, 90, 92–3, 95–6, 155, 166–7, 172, 231 Jung, Franz 25 Kermode, Frank 133, 145 Kerr, John 74, 118 Keynes, J.M. 115 Khan, M. Masud R. 129 Kierkegaard, Søren 71, 140 Kinkead-Weekes, Mark 66, 73, 83–4, 89, 102–4, 111, 146, 154, 160, 179, 184

Koteliansky, Samuel Solomonovitch (‘Kot’) 140, 166 Kraepelin, Emil 6 Kraus, Karl 139 Kuttner, Alfred 55, 58, 60, 93, 151–3 Lane, Homer 151, 154 Laplanche, Jean 77 Lawrence, D.H. CONCERNS bisexuality 85, 87, 133–8, 163, 184, 189, 246–7; bodily life 66–7, 70, 72, 143–4, 154–5, 158, 165, 190, 212, 226, 249; creativity 2, 59–60, 115, 151–2, 154, 179, 181, 234, 248–9; dream 82, 186–9, 231–2; dual instinct theory 83, 161, 179, 181–2; homosexuality 86, 94, 133–8, 156, 163–4, 189, 227, 242; hysteria 151, 198, 213–4, 216–20, 224, 227–8, 230; incest 36, 38–9, 60, 98, 157, 166–73, 174–8, 182, 188–9; liveliness as defence 37, 59–60, 165–6, 247–8; masculinism/ masculinity 66, 156, 168, 181, 184–5, 189, 234; ‘mental science’ historicised 60, 89–90, 92–3, 112, 167, 243; Oedipus complex 44, 53–4, 57–8, 60–1, 92–3, 112, 156, 244; pre-oedipal suffering 58–9, 172, 243–4, 248; psychoanalysis, criticism of 139–41, 145, 152, 157, 160, 166, 168, 172–4, 176, 186, 196–7, 204, 240–1, 244, 247; psychoanalytic terms, use of 50, 54, 68, 125, 139, 169, 183, 186; regression 93, 102; religion 83–5, 166, 180, 246; sadism 68–9, 125–30, 139; seduction/sexualisation of the child 57–8, 78, 123, 176, 182; spontaneity 2, 139, 159–61, 163, 171, 179–80, 241, 244, 248–9; sublimation 158, 175; symbolism 88; ‘third thing’ of relationship 65, 95–8, 100, 110, 126, 129, 131, 138; true self 245, 247

Index  255 SIGNIFICANT RELATIONSHIPS Burrow, Trigant 169–71, 239–48; reads ‘The origin of the IncestAwe’ 169–71; reviews The Social Basis of Consciousness 242–3 Eder, David 208–10; fictionalises in Kangaroo 73; friendship 73, 155–6; psychoanalysis discussed 73; theosophy 155–6, 164; war-shock 208–10 Freud, Sigmund knowledge of (1912) 32; ‘not Freudian’ 82; Oedipus Rex and Hamlet provide templates for selfanalysis 40; revision of Freudian unconscious 153, 155 Gross, Otto ‘brilliant’ follower of Freud 175, 200; discussed with Frieda (1912–13) 51–2; oedipal rivalry with Gross in writings 4, 111, 113, 119, 143, 176, 228, 228, 230; satirised 195–6; view of free love criticised 71, 132, 181, 200, 203–4 Jung, C.G. attendance at Jung lecture? 79, 169; criticises Jung 157, 166, 169, 241; reads Transformations and Symbols of the Libido 166; rejects typology 241 Lawrence, Frieda first meeting 1–4, 13; follows OG’s ‘new ethic’ 46–7, 49, 156, 200–2; Magna Mater 156, 165–7; marriage and commitment 4, 65–7, 71, 200; marriage, incestuous element 166–7; marriage, insecurities and tensions 113–14, 116, 132, 165, 185; mütterliches Weib 45, 167; narcissism 52, 66; possible futures imagined 143 WORKS Prose Fiction Aaron’s Rod 190, 196, 205, 210–35 ‘Daughters of the Vicar’ 84, 98 ‘England, My England’ 185 The First ‘Women in Love’ 125–6, 134, 136, 139–40, 143, 151–2, 163 ‘The Fox’ 187 ‘Honour and Arms’ 65, 67–70, 72

Kangaroo 73 Lady Chatterley’s Lover 206, 246 The Lost Girl 205, 222 Matilda 35 Mr Noon 15, 49, 53, 71, 79, 190, 195–205, 206, 219, 224, 243 ‘New Eve and Old Adam’ 65, 70–2, 111, 158 ‘Paul Morel’ 4 ‘Paul Morel’ II 31–40, 45 ‘Paul Morel’ III 2, 40–5, 50–1, 112 The Plumed Serpent 190, 228 The Rainbow 82, 84, 89–104, 115, 119–20, 125–6, 134, 154, 179, 206, 247 ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ 183 ‘The Sisters’ 69, 72, 78 Sons and Lovers 2, 33, 38, 53–61, 65, 67, 72–3, 77, 86,-7, 89, 101, 103, 114, 120, 151, 182, 185, 213, 248 St. Mawr 165–6 The Trespasser 32–3, 37, 39–40, 45, 59, 67 ‘Vin Ordinaire’ 65, 67–8, 72 ‘The Wedding Ring’ 89, 93 The White Peacock 34 Women in Love 69, 104, 115–46, 161, 200, 205–6 WORKS Prose, Plays, Poems A Collier’s Friday Night 34, 38–9, 43, 45 ‘The Crown’ 114–5, 133–4, 137 ‘Democracy’ 153 ‘Education of the People’ 153, 176, 182 Fantasia of the Unconscious 1, 153, 178–90, 196, 203, 210, 219, 225, 227, 232, 235, 239–40, 247, 249 The Fight for Barbara 52, 66 ‘A Life History in Harmonies and Discords’ 34–5 The Married Man 45–50, 68, 71, 111, 195, 201, 204 ‘Memoir of Maurice Magnus’ 223 Movements in European History 210, 221 ‘On Human Destiny’ 213 Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious 1, 153, 169, 172, 173–8, 195–6, 205, 239, 249

256 Index ‘Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness’ 243–5 Sea and Sardinia 196, 228 Studies in Classic American Literature 134, 153–66, 173, 176, 187–8, 195, 203 ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ 82–9, 91, 94, 97–8, 112, 161, 163–4 Twilight in Italy 4, 110–15, 136, 143, 176, 185, 228 Lawrence, Frieda 1, 3, 17–18; affair with OG 3–4, 124; correspondence with OG 13–18; difficulties in relationship with DHL 65–7, 113–14, 116; fictionalised in ‘The Married Man’ 45–50; in Mr Noon 200–4; free love 3–4, 17, 156, 201–2; gaps in Sons and Lovers 57; homosexuality and DHL 163, 189; influence on ‘Paul Morel’ 42–5; on Sons and Lovers 52–3; ‘intelligently’ for Freud 156; psychoanalysis, knowledge of (1912) 2 WORKS “Not I, But the Wind …” 1–3, 17 Memoirs 17 Leavis, F.R. 204 Leed, Eric 211 Lesser, Simon 38 Lloyd George, David 210, 227 Lodge, David 199 Long, Constance 82, 118 Low, Barbara 72, 145, 151–2, 154–5, 157, 166, 169, 175, 186, 214 Lowell, Amy 181 Low, Ivy 54, 72 Luhan, Mabel Dodge 239–42, 246 McLeod, Arthur 54–5, 68 McMillan, Margaret 74 Maddox, Brenda 47, 201 Magnus, Maurice 134, 223 Malinowski, Bronislaw 91 Mansfield, Katherine 72, 125, 166–7, 187, 203, 228 Marcus, Steven 12 Mare, Walter de la 51 Marsh, Eddie 169 Mauss, Marcel 91 Mensch, Barbara 119 Merskey, Harold 208 Milner, Marion 249 Milton 160; Paradise Lost 197

Mühsam, Erich 6 Murray, Gilbert 33 Murry, John Middleton 72–4, 114–5, 118, 125, 167 Neville, George 45–6, 195 Nichols, Robert 210, 220 Nietzsche, Friedrich 8–11, 16–19, 49, 69, 80, 83, 86, 96, 128, 144, 221, 226–7, 234 Nohl, Johannes 6 Noll, Richard 82 Orage, A.R. 32, 74, 111, 113, 164 Paine, Tom 202 Pankin, Shirley 58 Phillips, Adam 183, 206 Pierloot, Roland 56 Pines, Malcolm 31 Poe, Edgar Allen 157, 162–3, 168 Pryse, James Morgan 164 Putnam, James Jackson 81 Randall, Alfred E. 32 Rapp, Dean 32, 54, 173 Reeve, Neil 244 Rivers, W.H.R. 75, 181, 207–8, 212 Robert, Wilhelm 186 Ross, Charles 89 Rubiner, Ludwig 139 Ruderman, Judith 58, 134, 156, 184, 227 Ruskin, John 182 Russell, Bertrand 114, 124, 152 Rycroft, Charles 154–5, 187 Sanders, Scott 104, 134 Santayana, George 158 Savage, Henry 84, 133 Schapiro, Barbara Ann 56–9, 66, 72, 120, 126, 129, 133, 138 Schopenhauer, Arthur 214 Schorer, Mark 33 Schreiner, Olive 47 Shakespeare, William: Antony and Cleopatra 215, 224; Hamlet 15, 32, 40, 44–5, 53–4, 57, 66–7, 112; King Lear 122, 229; Macbeth 121; Othello 69 Shamdasani, Sonu 7, 77, 80, 118 Shaw, George Bernard 46 Shelley, P.B. 33 Shephard, Ben 209

Index  257 Shields, Clarence 239 Shorter, Edward 217 Showalter, Elaine 208, 212 Simmel, Georg 46, 50 Sinclair, May 32, 175 Sklar, Sylvia 49 Sklenicka, Carol 96 Sophocles 2, 32; Oedipus Rex 17, 33, 35–6, 39–40, 44, 53–4, 57, 61, 112 Spielrein, Sabina 11, 24, 77 Spinoza, Baruch 159, 186 Squire, J.C. 89 Steedman, Carolyn 226 Stekel, Wilhelm 17, 52, 68, 71–2, 124, 136 Sterne, Laurence 202 Stone, Martin 206–7 Sulloway, Frank 77, 85 Swift, Jonathan 180, 202 Swigg, Richard 84 Thornham, Susan 174 Trotter, Wilfred 225 Vaihinger, Hans 87, 140–1 Weber, Alfred 195, 197–9 Weber, Marianne 6, 21, 23 Weber Max 6–7, 14, 19–20, 197, 199; charismatic leadership 228–9, 234;

criticises OG 21–23, 47, 117, 174, 197, 199, 202, 204 Weekley Ernest 1, 52, 201 Weekley, Frieda see Frieda Lawrence Weiss, Daniel 55–7 Werfel, Franz 10, 18, 135–6 West, Rebecca 207 Whimster, Sam 6, 23 White, Jack 219 Whitman, Walt 110, 134, 161–4, 168–9, 184, 189, 205, 247 Wilde, Oscar 33 Williams, Linda Ruth 129, 132 Williams, Raymond 119, 122, 146 Winnicott, D.W. 59, 70, 72, 99, 110, 142, 164, 170, 174, 184, 190, 248–9; creativity and destruction 180; liveliness as denial 165, 248; spontaneous gesture 160, 240; True Self 248 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 164 Wordsworth, William 115, 164 Worthen, John 1–4, 33, 36, 49, 54, 56, 134–5, 180 Yeats, W.B. 91 Yorke, Dorothy 155, 219–20 Zangwill, Israel 74